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INSTITUTE FOR THE FUTURE | The Future of Persuasion
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INSTITUTE FOR THE FUTURE | The Future of Persuasion
flickr.com/christheobscure
flickr.com/shadowmagi

5.
HUMANITY AT A CROSSROADS: THE POLES OF POWER AND PERSUASION
Humanity at a Crossroads:
The poles of power and persuasion
Whether through flat-out coercion or the subtlest seduc-
tion, moving others to a belief, position, or course of
action lies at the core of political, social, and commercial
power. In ancient Greece, the art of rhetoric was cen-
tral to education, and a key topic for philosophers and
politicians. Fast-forward to the last century and the rise
of mass commercialism, to the juggernaut of modern
advertising—the art of the sell.
Now consider the rapidly evolving landscape of connec-
tive, aware technologies that we find ourselves living with
today. We have reached an inflection point in technologi-
cal and social change at the end of the first decade of
this new century. In many parts of the planet—not just the
wealthy developed world—we have moved well beyond
figuring out how to simply access and create data, and
are becoming enmeshed with mobile, increasingly aware
technological systems that are orders of magnitude more
intimate, more automated, and knowledgeable about us
than anything we have seen before.
Welcome to the future of persuasion.
Behavioral sciences, neuroscience, genetics, and social
network data are creating a new science of motivation
and desire. Networked sensor data, semantic analysis,
vibrant virtual and augmented realities, compelling data
visualization tools, video everywhere, and mobile super-
computing: just as these systems create new avenues for
self and collective expression, they also open us up to
new avenues of persuasion.
What we do with these tools could not be more important.
Will we use them to motivate ourselves and others for
positive behavior change, as we seek new life practices
that create long-term sustainability for our planet? Or
will we be manipulated by those with access to unprec-

Speechmaking was one of the earliest persuasive
technologies, immortalized here in an image of famous
rhetorician Cicero denouncing Catiline in the Roman Senate.

Today, many think of persuasion as linked to modern
advertising.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cicero/
www.amctv.com/originals/madmen/
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INSTITUTE FOR THE FUTURE | The Future of Persuasion
edented insight into what we do and say, where we do it,
and with whom we do it?
In this report, we will journey through the future of persua-
sion, looking at “forces of persuasion”—the core drivers
of change in how we will be persuaded and will persuade
others—along with related strategies for designing more
persuasive experiences and defending against unwanted
kinds of persuasion. We will explore the combinations of
technologies that will provide the foundation for change,
and we will meet some of the practitioners and researchers
who are developing this future.
The new forces, technologies, and applications of persua-
sion presented in this report suggest a range of scenarios
for the future development of persuasion, with a range of
social and economic impacts. More important, however, is
the dynamic between the two sides of persuasion: per-
suading and being persuaded. It is perhaps this dynamic—
sometimes in harmony and sometimes in conflict—that
will have the largest impact on technology, innovation, and
society over the coming decade.
Ultimately, the two are likely to co-evolve, each feeding the
other. This creative co-evolution suggests a scenario of
rapid innovation and expansion of all forms of technologi-
cal context awareness, with both predictable and unex-
pected opportunities for creating economic, personal, and
collective value. However, the same dynamic—where top-
down control meets bottom-up hacking—may also create
darker scenarios when the interests of those at opposite
ends of the dynamic conflict. Thus the future is certain to
heighten debates on the commercial use of digital data, the
role of technology in daily life, and individual privacy.
The persuasive future we are entering is not an option;
we must all participate in it. It is the future of advertising,
of learning, of the workplace, and of health. We have to
choose our stance toward this future and understand that
for all of us, in our roles as consumers, users, citizens, em-
ployers, and employees, the challenge is how to harness
the power of persuasion for the right reasons rather than
for the wrong ones.
Cialdini, Robert B. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. Fogg, BJ. Persuasive Technology. Ariely, Dan. Predictably
Irrational. Gladwell, Malcolm. Blink. Pink, Daniel H. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

We are in the midst of
an explosion of new
findings and popular
interest in the art and
science of persuasion
and motivation.
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9.
THE REMAKING OF PERSUASION: SEVEN FORCES AT PLAY
Many future means of persuasion will be the same as they were in the past: logic, argumentation, a well-crafted
story. But our understanding of persuasion, attitude formation, and behavior change is evolving, not only through
traditional disciplines like psychology and economics, but increasingly through neuroscience, game design, and
the development of new persuasive technologies.
We’ve synthesized new scientific findings and emerging technologies into seven forces that will define persuasion
in the next ten years. These forces can be harnessed and directed, even designed, but rarely controlled or stopped
outright. Read them for an understanding of how we are about to find ourselves heavily influenced by a whole
host of new people, places, and things.
The Remaking of Persuasion
Seven forces at play
Force One:
Digital Mirrors
Algorithms analyze and reflect back
our digital activity to shape attitudes,
behaviors, and identities.
We are each beginning to create an enormous number of
digital artifacts, which we can choose either to share or to
protect. Health records, fitness logs, social contact lists,
media preferences, and so on are, to varying degrees, all
entering the public sphere. These artifacts will be mined
to create a “digital mirror” of our lives. With the dramatic
increase in the number of digital artifacts, there will be a
greater drive to make sense of it all—to understand how
the artifacts are linked. Innovations in web graph analysis
are the new frontier for creating digital mirrors of our lives,
which will reflect back new awareness and analysis of our
own behaviors. These digital reflections, often based on
analytics that will be hidden from us, will become a power-
ful source of influence on our actions and emotions.
Systems for self-improvement
Often, digital mirrors will be devices or services that we
adopt for self-improvement. For example, the Personal
Performance Coach from Accenture Technology Labs is a
software prototype that will listen to both ends of a mobile
phone conversation and determine whether one party is
talking too much or interrupting too frequently. The system
reports feedback right after a call and rewards improve-
ment over time. Many digital mirrors will take a similar
form, watching what we do and, like any coach or personal
trainer, offering analysis, feedback, and motivation. But
how will we know what interrupting too much is, without
some baseline for comparison?
Systems that know me better than I know myself
Accenture’s digital mirror is personal, but many other digital
mirrors will reflect something back only in comparison of
our lives to others. One such mirror is called TweetPsych,
an online service—or perhaps provocation—that offers to
generate a “psychological profile” by looking at the words
in a Twitter user’s stream of tweets and comparing to other
users’ tweets. These comparisons range from the emo-
tional valence of a Twitter stream—such as whether it is in
a more positive or negative style than the average user—to
a frequency comparison of topics such as education or
finance.
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INSTITUTE FOR THE FUTURE | The Future of Persuasion
Such digital assessments are not trivial. Behavioral
confirmation, a foundational theory from psychology, has
repeatedly demonstrated that we change our behaviors
based on what others expect us to be. In a classic test of
behavioral confirmation in which undergraduate students
interacted over a phone, female students were deemed
friendlier and more charming when the males they were
talking to had been told their counterparts were attractive.1
A perceiver can cause another person to act in ways that
confirm the perceiver’s expectations. Neuroscience is
suggesting our brains are even wired to experience such
confirmations directly in the ventral striatum, the innate
reward center of the brain.2
What our mirrors tell us about
ourselves will impact what we think of ourselves, and even
what we do.
Systems that know me by my friends
Project Gaydar was an experiment in 2007 by a few MIT
undergraduate students who were curious to know what
our social networks could reveal about us. Their goal was
simple: to determine the sexual orientation of a person on
Facebook who did not specify it, solely by aggregating the
specified sexual orientations of Facebook friends. Their
formula made the right determination in every single case,
according to the volunteers who agreed to reveal it.
Project Gaydar was deemed “right” 100% of the time because
the cooperating students had clearly defined sexual orienta-
tions but chose not to declare one in their Facebook profiles.
There are, however, many reasons people do not list some-
thing like sexual orientation or political persuasion, and
privacy, while vitally important, is probably not as dominant
a reason as uncertainty. Many people’s attitudes may sim-
ply not yet be formed; they may be still deciding, or solidly
in the middle. Digital Mirrors are confronting younger users
in particular with a new “age of early self-conception,” as
Web entrepreneur Ben Casnocha has termed it. “As young-
er and younger people set up profiles,” he says, “they end
up confronting some of the central angst-inducing identity
questions early in life.” For future digital mirrors, however,
the nuances of uncertainly and proto-identity formation
will likely not matter, and they will begin to tailor our digital
experiences according to our best answers or their best
estimations.

Project Gaydar is a project from MIT students
to determine the unlisted sexual orientation
of a profile just by looking at the listed
orientations of their online friends.
www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/
articles/2009/09/20/project_gaydar_an_
mit_experiment_raises_new_questions_
about_online_privacy/?page=full
6

TweetPsych will create a “psychological
profile” of any public Twitter account, based
on the words used in that Twitter stream.
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11.
THE REMAKING OF PERSUASION: SEVEN FORCES AT PLAY

The Microsoft KIN phone handset provides a steady stream
of updates from your social network.
Digital mirrors: reflective or predictive?
We might be inclined to label these digital mirrors as not
only reflective but also predictive. Again, harking back to
the principle of behavioral confirmation, we adjust our be-
haviors to live up to others’ expectations. Advertising firms
like RapLeaf and social networks like Facebook, using
digital mirrors such as TweetPsych and Project Gaydar and
supplemented with enormous stores of “friendship data,”
could begin to adjust our online interactions and environ-
ments—automatic curation of digital news or the personal-
ized layout of a Web shopping site—to their expectations
of who we are. With such constant embodiment of these
expectations, there exists a real potential that we may be
tipped one way or the other to conform to meet them: gay
or straight, liberal or conservative, safe or unsafe credit
risk, in a solid relationship or “on the rocks.” Far beyond re-
flecting or predicting, digital mirrors will be powerful forces
for persuasion.
Force Two:
Network on My
Shoulder
Friends, networks, and online crowds
show up in everything we do, offering
instant support or mass peer pressure.
Having easy access to people online is not particularly new
(though it’s not all that old either; Facebook, after all, has
only been around about six years). Mobile phones provide
on-the-go access to contact lists, and instant messag-
ing gives us our buddy lists. These interactions are still
conversations, however, and even IM or text message
conversations bring with them extraneous conventions
and traditions—the tax of small talk—that prevent people
from reaching out as often as they might for quick motiva-
tion or support. Buddy lists and contact lists offer easy
access to the network at our fingertips, but they are quickly
morphing into networks on our shoulders. These networks
will transform the way we are influenced—and influence
others. As they become more automated, and constantly
visible, we will begin to compare our daily behaviors to new
“norms” set by our own social networks or even by crowds
of strangers. Peer pressure will be amplified, creating new
forms of crowd mentality, for good and for bad.
Networks go from conversation to general awareness
In May 2010, Microsoft released an eagerly awaited but
quickly abandoned new entry into the market of mobile
phones. Microsoft’s KIN targeted users in their teens and
twenties, and to appeal to this audience, the company
radically departed from what has become common in
7
www.kin.com

RapLeaf scans millions of blogs, social networks,
and digital trails and uses the term “friendship
data” to describe how they augment existing ad
campaigns. The CEO of Rapleaf exemplified their
strategy with a scenario where “a home buyer with
an on-the-fence credit score should be treated as
a safer bet if his friends have higher scores.”
www.rapleaf.com

12.
INSTITUTE FOR THE FUTURE | The Future of Persuasion
mobile phone design. Instead of a home screen with icons
representing different apps or functions on the phone, the
KIN displays a constant stream of updates from friends
and contacts in a user’s social networks, so there will be no
hesitation between wondering and knowing what friends
are up to. This is a “Network on My Shoulder.”
Devices like KIN portend a significant shift, from intentional
and targeted conversations within a social network to a
more automatic and mass awareness of the network’s
activities, moods, and needs. The change from conversa-
tions to awareness is essential to understanding the new
persuasive power of social networks. Even though the KIN
line from Microsoft has since been discontinued, other
mobile phones built on the popular Android platform
feature social network streams as home screens, including
new offerings from Motorola.
Networks go automated
As devices sense behaviors and environments, they will
begin reporting not only to their owners but also directly to
online networks. The Withings body scale, for example, is
known as the “scale that tweets,” and what it advertises as
a feature to some people is probably a nightmare to oth-
ers: the option to post the result of each weigh-in to social
networks like Facebook or Twitter. Once a person’s weight
exists on an online network, other people can interact with
it, ideally with supportive comments and replies.
The Withings scale epitomizes a scenario in which we
adopt a persuasive technology for personal benefit. The
scale must be purchased, connected to a wireless network,
associated with a social network, and finally set to auto-
matically broadcast weight. For some it will be well worth it
for access to near-real-time encouragement.
Networks force comparison with the crowd
Not all network interactions will be opt-in, however. It will
be much harder to ignore the network on your shoulder
when it is built right onto your desktop—as with the Daydar
software prototype from the MIT Media Lab.
Daydar is a system to track and display the minute-by-
minute, day-by-day productivity of a team or social net-
work. A dynamically updated progress report is displayed
as the desktop background of each member’s computer.
The size and colors of the blobs on the display correspond
to both the scale of tasks and the real-time success of the
team or network at accomplishing them. The user is made
aware of their own progress and how it compares with the
rest of the team, even more subtly and consistently than
with a stream of social network updates such as those
produced by a device like the Withings scale.
Daydar users can compare their behaviors and per-
formance to the crowd at a glance. Surely this can be
motivating—the principle of social proof says that we typi-
cally turn to those around us for information on behavior
norms—but Daydar points toward a new type of subtler,
inescapable awareness of others.
www.withings.com
web.media.mit.edu/~jkestner/papers/Daydar.pdf

The Withings scale, also known as the “scale that tweets.”

MIT Media Lab’s Daydar—a prototype to track and display
the daily productivity of your social network.
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THE REMAKING OF PERSUASION: SEVEN FORCES AT PLAY
Networks create new baselines for normal
Many will feel that productivity is an acceptable domain
of life for systems that quantify, display, and compare
our performance to others. But few would likely want the
network on their shoulder when they are having sex. The
Bedpost app is a digital diary for self-trackers who are
interested in reflecting back on the details of their sex lives
(social networking features are limited to partner logins). It
is a product of the growing Quantified Self phenomenon:
people who track data points in their lives ranging from
daily happiness and well-being to attention and productiv-
ity, to health metrics and even sex.3
Bedpost and Daydar suggest that we are bringing the Net-
work on My Shoulder into previously personal areas of life.
The aggregated data produced by these systems is also
establishing new baselines—metrics that can be accessed
instantly but that are also potentially unavoidable, even
when we may not be seeking a social comparison.
Force Three:
Telepathic
Technologies
Sensors tracking our location, health,
and attention know just the right time
and right place to persuade or intervene.
Stanford innovator and psychologist BJ Fogg notes timing
is often the missing element in behavior change. Fogg has
a name for properly timed alerts—he calls them triggers—
and he has isolated triggers as the single most powerful
component of successful behavior change.
There have been many visions over the years of the per-
suasive potential of technologies if only they knew some-
thing about our immediate context, such as our mood,
schedule, location, or health. Sensors that track such
factors could know just the right time and right place to
persuade or intervene. We are currently in the midst of an
explosion in the deployment of sensors to detect images,
heat, motion, and more. New household sensors, for ex-
ample, will create assistive environments and new kinds of
smart objects. Hundreds of sensors are being embedded
within cars that allow parts to communicate among them-
selves, and that also deal with human factors issues. In ad-
dition, we are finally at the brink of having mobile devices
not only be aware of location but also understand aspects
of our biological state. Mobile phones have been relatively
dumb for most of their history but are quickly becoming
intelligently aware.
As the devices and environments around us become
aware, they will play a bigger role in making decisions for
us, or in nudging us toward specific actions.
www.bedposted.com
www.medgadget.com/archives/2010/05/apple_files.patent_
for_iphone_heart_monitor.html

Bedpost is a digital diary to make it easier for self-trackers
interested in reflecting back on the details of their sex lives.

Apple filed a patent in May
2010 for the iPhone to detect
heart rate through the casing of
the phone itself.
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INSTITUTE FOR THE FUTURE | The Future of Persuasion
An old dream: telepathic advertising
One of the most enduring telepathic scenarios is the
location-based coupon where, for example, owners of a
coffee shop can beam an instant discount to the mobile
phones of people passing by their front door. This vision
has been waiting for cellular networks and mobile handsets
to catch up, but implementation is finally here.
The North Face chain of outdoor clothing stores is piloting
a campaign in the summer of 2010 to send text messages
to potential customers as they—and their location-aware
mobile phones—pass under a “geo-fence,” a virtual pe-
rimeter corresponding to several city blocks around each
store, that triggers a message upon entry. This is a pilot
project, and participants are required to opt in and declare
their interest in the North Face brand, but it points to a fu-
ture in which our technologies know something—or maybe
a lot of things—about our immediate context and take ac-
tion accordingly, almost as if they were telepathic.
Persuading the future me
The North Face geo-coupon is an important new op-
portunity area for digital marketing, but mobile locative
capability is also being tapped by enterprising people to
power their own goals. These users are repurposing smart
phone apps to be more mindful, and to improve their own
behaviors. The Locale app, for example, is designed to turn
off a phone’s ringer when the phone enters a user’s own
geo-fence. One woman programmed her phone to vibrate
whenever she passed the gym, a tactile reminder and ping
of guilt. A programmer wrote his own app so that his phone
would send out a text message to friends whenever he
lingered near an electronics store where he was known to
spend too much money.
At least for the near future of telepathic technologies
(including location-aware phones), such grassroots stories
of personal mindfulness and self-improvement will be
interesting to follow, as people seek out capabilities to help
them keep on track with their long-term goals. But certainly
the next phase of telepathic technologies will be those
that not only detect conditions but also then act—more
autonomously, even aggressively—to alter our environment
or our behavior.
www.nytimes.com/2010/02/23/business/media/23adco.html?_r=1
flickr user: wheelo28

Locale allows users to specify conditions under
which their phone’s settings should change.

The North Face is piloting a program to send text mes-
sages to potential customers when they pass under the
“geo-fence” surrounding retail stores.
www.twofortyfouram.com/
product.html
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15.
THE REMAKING OF PERSUASION: SEVEN FORCES AT PLAY
Detecting attention
Most of us would like to avoid danger, especially when
we’re operating a vehicle. Therefore, significant research
is being done to detect the physiological state of people
while they are driving, initially to detect moments of immi-
nent danger. Mercedes offers a feature in its high-end
models, known as Attention Assist, which will watch for
patterns of erratic driving. Lexus brands its similar func-
tionality as a Driver Attention Monitor, in which a camera
trained on the driver’s face detects nodding off, and Saab
is focusing even more closely on a driver’s eyes with its
Driver Attention Warning System. In labs, work is being
done to use video processing to detect drivers’ yawns,
and researchers have built prototype cars that will blare
alerts or vibrate the steering wheel to rouse a sleepy driver.
Researchers have proposed tailoring a car’s environment in
response to even greater awareness of a driver’s condi-
tion, such as minimizing alerts when a driver is stressed, or
decreasing music volume when navigating new terrain.4
Offices and classrooms are also taking on greater context
awareness. Research has found that a person’s level of
fidgeting is one good measure of attentiveness and en-
gagement, and work is being done to tailor digital learning
environments with fidget-detecting chairs.
Microsoft is researching systems that can “automatically
detect frustration or stress in the user” through facial analy-
sis or biofeedback and that “offer and provide assistance
accordingly,” such as simpler interfaces to the current task
or even performing the task automatically. Microsoft is also
doing work to make sense of users’ cognitive processing
as they perform computer-based tasks.
Adaptive interfaces for better persuasion
Beyond basic personal safety, one of the fastest grow-
ing needs for telepathic tech is to help us with informa-
tion and cognitive over-stimulation. Researchers at Tufts
University wired stockbrokers—people who are constantly
monitoring streams of financial data looking for patterns
and who need to “recognize major changes without getting
bogged down in the details.” The stockbrokers were asked
to watch a stream of financial data and write an involved
email message to a colleague. As they got more involved
in composing the email, the fNIRS (functional near-infrared
spectroscopy, which measures blood oxygenation levels in
the brain) system detected this and simplified the presenta-
tion of financial data accordingly.
The dynamic displays employed by the Tufts researchers
are part of an emerging area of exploration known as adap-
tive interfaces: intuitive interfaces that effortlessly connect
our desires to our actions. Such interfaces could be over-
used in the future as our technologies come to know more
about our mental states. The researchers warned, “it is a
safe assumption that users do not expect an interface to
change with every whim and daydream during the course
of their workday. We must be judicious with our design de-
cisions.” However, as the decade progresses and our cars
can sense when we are tired, our chairs know when we are
bored, and our computers will almost literally be telepathic,
our interactions will change because technology will adjust
accordingly, typically in the direction of removing options in
the name of simplicity.
www.newscientist.com/blog/invention/2007/10/
microsoft-mind-reading.html
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1294237

Chairs outfitted with sensors can detect engagement and adapt
interfaces accordingly.

Researchers at Microsoft have prototyped a system
designed to switch to simplified workloads when a user
is experiencing cognitive overload.
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INSTITUTE FOR THE FUTURE | The Future of Persuasion
Force Four:
No-Click World
Personalized, adaptive interfaces effort-
lessly connect our desires to our actions.
In his 2004 book, The Paradox of Choice, sociologist Barry
Schwartz puts forward the idea that having an abundance
of choices in our modern life causes us a great deal of
anxiety, disappointment, and ultimately unhappiness. He
acknowledges that “autonomy and freedom of choice are
critical to our well-being” but concludes that we are ulti-
mately happier when some decisions are made for us.
In the coming decade, this growing understanding of,
and importance placed on, simplicity will be embodied in
emerging technologies that reduce the work required to
process information and up the level of social engagement
between user and technology. These technologies will in-
clude natural, intuitive interfaces and displays that convey
data and progress in the actual in situ settings.
BJ Fogg has developed a behavior model that synthesizes
and simplifies previous thinking about which formulas
can reliably and repeatedly achieve desired outcomes. In
Fogg’s model, a person will perform a desired behavior
when sufficiently motivated, when able to perform the
behavior, and when triggered to perform it at the right time.
Fogg uses the term simplicity interchangeably with ability,
suggesting that “to increase a user’s ability, designers of
persuasive experiences must make the behavior easier. In
other words, persuasive design relies heavily on the power
of simplicity.”5
Decide for me
Enter the iPhone restaurant-finding app called Urbanspoon.
It offers a large database of restaurant listings that you can
search by location, cuisine, and price, but it is not the size
of database or the myriad of ways to slice-and-dice it that
has made Urbanspoon wildly successful; instead, it is the
ability to shake the phone and, in slot machine style, get
a restaurant recommendation delivered at random. As of
March 2010, the app has been collectively shaken half a
billion times.
www.urbanspoon.com

The Urbanspoon app invites users to shake
their iPhone and, slot machine style, get a
restaurant recommendation delivered at
random.
www.yelp.com

Yelp Monocle offers an augmented reality
display of Yelp’s ratings for businesses
on Yelp.
12

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THE REMAKING OF PERSUASION: SEVEN FORCES AT PLAY
Reducing barriers to action
One of the most important powers of augmented reality will
be to make nearby opportunities more visible and more
actionable. Like Urbanspoon, Yelp has created apps for
smart phone platforms to make their extensive databases
of local businesses more actionable in situations where
users are hunting for something nearby. Yelp’s mobile inter-
faces are quite usable, but they can require several steps
between curiosity about what is nearby and actually finding
enough information (name, location, rating) to act. Yelp has
worked to reduce these barriers with a new mobile-app
feature called Monocle, an augmented reality (AR) overlay
that displays nearby business listings over a real-time video
feed of the street in front of the phone. The listings are
overlaid based on the direction the phone is facing and the
distance from the phone’s position, leaving a user to simply
put one foot in front of the other until reaching a place that
sounds interesting.
Finding the right restaurant is not itself an especially
important behavior, but imagine a simple presentation
similar to Yelp Monocle’s but for the nearest healthy food
options or the nearest place to recycle a plastic bottle that
would otherwise be thrown away. Both are situations where
effortlessly simple interfaces will be the difference between
action and avoidance, persuasion and ignorance.
Using nature to stimulate engagement
Just as Monocle encourages urban discovery by making it
easier to explore, the no-click world will also have inter-
faces that persuade us toward physical activity as a matter
of life or death—not our death, but that of virtual objects in
our care. Such organic metaphors will increasingly be used
to embody real-time data.
These interfaces are examples of the simplicity principle in
action: they strip away unnecessary data and tell you only
what you need to know to adjust your behavior quickly.
They could instead use bar charts—inorganic blocks that
stack on top of each other—but the organic metaphors tap
into a deeper motivation we have, to help living things live,
or at least not let them die on our watch.
www.wired.com/autopia/2008/12/when-ford-and-h/
www.fitbit.com

The dashboard for the 2010 Ford Focus Hybrid car
prominently features a plant that grows healthier as
a person drives more fuel efficiently.

The only display on the Fitbit
Tracker, the first mass-con-
sumer wearable physical-
activity sensor, is a flower that
blooms only when its wearer
is reaching a target level of
physical activity for the day.
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Using social interaction to stimulate engagement
It turns out that humans are still fairly primal when it comes
to interacting with technology that seems even vaguely
alive, especially if it seems human. Stanford professors
Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass have extensively studied
this phenomenon and have dubbed our vestigial and
cordial reactions to friendly technology as “The Media
Equation.” Their conclusion is that people treat computers,
TV, and new media as real people and places.
This gullibility may actually be a source of persuasive
potential. Intuitive Automata, a commercial spinoff of the
MIT Media Lab, uses conversational interfaces and friendly
robots to motivate patient engagement with traditional tele-
medicine systems. These systems are designed to check
in daily with patients living with chronic disease, asking
questions like “How do you feel today?” and “Have you
been eating?” Their research showed that even with the
standard simple display and a few buttons, it can be hard
to sustain patient engagement long enough to truly man-
age the disease. So they ran an experiment in which some
patients received a standard telemedicine device while
others received Autom, Intuitive Automata’s anthropomor-
phic robot. Autom is built around a telemedicine screen but
also nods, blinks, and converses with patients about their
health. Patients who received Autom continued to engage
with the daily questions from their health care provider for
twice as long as those who received only the screen.
In the coming decade we will find ourselves increasingly
being seduced and cajoled by our software and hardware.
Force Five:
Epic Win
We will use games to persuade ourselves
to be better people, from working harder to
feeling more empathy, to considering the
effects of our actions.
The convergence of social networks, console gaming,
locative personal media, and alternate reality gaming is
driving a growing recognition that games, as IFTF Direc-
tor of Game Research and Development Jane McGonigal
puts it, are some of the world’s best engines of happiness,
joy, fierce competition, human connection, and hard work.
Thus the movement to port the most compelling aspects
of games—what makes them fun—to other arenas, to moti-
vate more engagement with learning, work, public action,
and health.
Harnessing digital achievement
The Boy Scouts have been leveraging one persuasive
power of gaming—achievement—through awarding merit
badges for more than 100 years. In early 2010, the Boy
Scouts announced a video gaming badge that is earned
by completing activities such as playing a video game
with family members in a tournament or listing five ways
that a friend could learn how to play the Scout’s favorite
game. This announcement stirred some warranted
controversy about childhood obesity and turning kids into
“screen zombies,” but the Boy Scouts’ new badge was
also an acknowledgment that digital performance can be
harnessed and channeled for positive outcomes.
Now that so much game play is done online and integrated
with social networks, earning and displaying rewards for
achievement is even more prominent. Casual gaming on
Facebook has brought digital merit badges to a vast swath of
older netizens, expanding digital achievement systems well
beyond the conventional online or console gaming audience.
.
www.intuitiveautomata.com
www.wired.com/gamelife/2010/04/
cub-scouts-videogames/

Intuitive Automata created Autom, an anthropomorphic robot,
to engage with patients about their health.

The Boy Scouts
recently announced a
“video gaming” badge
earned by engaging
friends and family in
gaming.
14

19.
THE REMAKING OF PERSUASION: SEVEN FORCES AT PLAY
Games as powerful social influencers
In 2007, Georgia Tech professor and game designer Ian
Bogost coined the term persuasive games, arguing that
games have the power not only to entertain, but to per-
suade and inform, to impart a point of view to their players
through the ideology embedded in their core logic and
narratives. Through the process of learning the rules and
exploring a game’s internal physics of cause and effect,
players find themselves in rich interaction with alternative
ideologies. Bogost and others design persuasive games
that pull players into unexplored worlds and force them to
confront situations that make them think about real world
problems … without being preachy or uncomfortable.
For example, MTVu, MTV’s 24-hour college network,
launched online Flash game Darfur is Dying, a “viral video
game for change.” Players take on the role of a Darfur refu-
gee and at several points in the game are restricted to very
limited options, including keystrokes or clicks that simply
will not be acknowledged by the game. The lack of options
to progress is designed to mirror the helplessness expe-
rienced by many refugees of the Darfur conflict. Human
rights organization Breakthrough has created the game
ICED—“I Can End Deportation”—inviting players to walk in
the shoes of someone in the ecosystem of U.S. immigra-
tion. It immerses players in a character’s daily struggles,
translated into missions to complete as a seamless aspect
of gameplay.
ICED and Darfur is Dying are free online games, both
exemplifying fairly lightweight development. With low-
cost tools like Adobe Flash and new engines to make
3D worlds, a compelling game can be made quickly and
cheaply by almost any party with an ideology to express.
Morality engines go mainstream
These same ideas are also influencing the design of more
mainstream video games. Fable II is a big-budget fantasy
role-playing game for Microsoft’s Xbox system that starts
players as young adventurers and ages their online char-
acters as time passes in the game’s narrative chronology.
The game touts your freedom in its virtual universe to do
almost anything you can think of in the real world—but to
go along with such freedom it includes a “Morality Engine,”
which attaches “morality points” to every action. In fact,
your character’s physical aging process is correlated to
your morality score, including the potential for a flawed
complexion due to immoral deeds performed earlier in your
virtual life. Your character’s weight is correlated to your
eating choices, and you earn “purity points” for eating a
vegetarian diet. In the next decade, expect games to show
up outside of traditional gaming platforms, but also look for
them to push us to be more aware of the real world of real
human relations.

Persuasive Games: The
Expressive Power of Video
Games, by Ian Bogost.
www.persuasivegames.com
www.darfurisdying.comwww.icedgame.com

Darfur is Dying is billed as a “viral video game for change,”
produced by MTVu, MTV’s 24-hour college network.

ICED is an online game that lets you inhabit the first-person
shoes of someone in the ecosystem of U.S. immigration.
15

20.
INSTITUTE FOR THE FUTURE | The Future of Persuasion
Force Six:
Amplified
Imagination
Dynamic visualizations morph reality
to influence how we see the world and
ourselves.
The future of persuasion is being transformed by tools that
dramatically expand the capacity to visualize our environ-
ments and ourselves, from augmented reality overlays to
more commonplace immersion in virtual environments with
avatars representing us. From simple cartoon representa-
tions to powerfully realistic graphic renderings, the new
world of visualization will have powerful effects on human
psychology. According to Stanford professor Byron Reeves,
avatars could be “the most psychologically potent feature
of new media”—in other words, the most persuasive.
Emerging technologies are giving us enormous new powers
to create simulations that are “realer than real,” based on
rendering combined with complex modeled behaviors and
interactions. These technologies will allow us to amplify our
imagination by creating environments that are photorealis-
tic and that we can accept as real. Such applications will
also enable us to create super-realistic avatars; soon we
will be able to create effects as good as in the movie Avatar
using just our phones.
Vulnerability to the virtual self
Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL), a leading
center for work on the persuasive power of avatars, is at
the frontier of understanding the profound effects that
virtual-body experiences can have on our decisions,
judgment, and emotions. The “Proteus Effect” describes
how we alter our behaviors, both in virtual environments
and in the real world, in response to experiences via virtual
avatars. For example, researchers have demonstrated that
inhabiting a taller avatar makes us more confident, seeing
our avatar exercise or eat healthily promotes those same
behaviors in the real world, and, in what the lab calls self-
endorsement, seeing our avatar happily using a product
increases our affinity for that product.6
But it’s not only experiences with avatars that will persuade
us in the next decade. The rise of photo-, audio-, and
video-morphing tools will increase the possibilities of more
subtle forms of self-endorsement … ones that we might
not even be aware of. Another series of experiments at
Stanford’s VHIL suggests just how malleable we might be
when seeing subtle aspects of ourselves hidden in images
of others. Researchers morphed the faces of U.S. presi-
dential candidates in a 60%/40% blend with either a ran-
dom person or the participant in the experiment, and the
participant was asked to vote for a candidate. The results
were striking: the candidate morphed with the participant’s
own face was more likely to be selected than one morphed
with a stranger’s face. And in post-experiment interviews,
not a single person detected that his or her image had
been morphed with the photograph of the candidate.
vhil.stanford.edu/pubs/2005/identity-capture.html
Bailenson,J.N.&Segovia,K.Y.(2010).Virtualdoppelgangers:
Psychologicaleffectsofavatarswhoignoretheirowners.
InW.S.Bainbridge(Ed.),Onlineworlds:Convergenceofthe
realandthevirtual(175-186).Springer:NewYork.

Subjects in a Stanford study who had their faces morphed in
a 60/40 blend with presidential candidates were more likely to
vote for the candidate morphed with their own face.

Stanford’s VHIL Lab has been exploring the psychology
of our relationships to virtual images of ourselves,
showing that virtual bodies can have significant impact
on our physical bodies.
16

21.
THE REMAKING OF PERSUASION: SEVEN FORCES AT PLAY
Avatars get pervasive
Avatars do have not to be super-realistic to be effective,
nor do they require a fully immersive virtual reality headset
or even an extensive virtual world to roam around in, such
as the standard-bearer virtual world Second Life. Avatars
are gaining steady traction as their own form of social
networking, and many teens around the world send instant
messages or talk in chat rooms alongside an avatar ac-
companiment. They are primarily socializing—not exploring
or gaming—and this use of avatars as an extra layer of
sociality is likely where we will continue to see them.
IMVU is a leader in avatar-based social platforms primarily
targeting kids and teens, reporting 10 million users of their
service a month. IMVU offers its users an almost unlimited
capacity to customize their avatars’ height, hair color, and
so on. Other options, including a general inclination toward
doll-like proportions, are fairly dysmorphic and out of step
with the natural range of body sizes in the real world. If
avatars really are the most psychologically potent form of
new media, and if inhabiting modified avatars begins to
alter our real-world moods and behaviors, avatar use by
young people will be the next battleground for parental
concern and oversight (as MySpace and Facebook were
this past decade).
Immersive previews
As discussed in Force Four: No-Click World, augmented
reality (AR) will be applied as a persuasive means of trans-
lating information into immediate action in the real context
of decision making. But the better-known vision of AR—as
a sort of magic window, overlaying images of things-that-
could-be right into our view—will also provide context-
aware imagery that will influence opinions and choices.
Early work on AR has been done in the context of urban
planning and community development, often to help
citizens imagine how new developments or master plans
would manifest in a specific neighborhood. In Rotterdam,
for example, residents can see how a large new building
called Market Hall will look when it is completed in 2014 by
viewing the construction site through their AR-capable mo-
bile phones. As simple AR toolkits make it easy to create
such visualizations, we can imagine multiple visualizations
for a proposed development, each aligned to a different
point of view, competing for citizens’ hearts and minds,
and ultimately inciting votes or protest about how a com-
munity should develop.
www.avatars.imvu.com
www.ad.nl

Avatars from IMVU, an avatar-based instant messaging
service with 10 million users a month.

Augmented reality will show us real-world possibilities
before they materialize. This app gives passers-by a view
of what the new Market Hall in Rotterdam will look like
when it is completed in 2014.
17

22.
INSTITUTE FOR THE FUTURE | The Future of Persuasion
Visual filters make sense of real-time data
At IFTF, we frequently look to digital artists, activists, and
provocateurs as early indicators of future directions of
change; often their work is a painstakingly handcrafted pro-
totype of what will be an automated feature of tomorrow’s
technology. One such vision can be found in a video, made
by mashup artist 236.com, which went viral near the end
of the 2008 presidential campaign. It repurposed clips from
the three Obama–McCain presidential debates, overlapping
clips every time a candidate repeated a political phrase he
had said verbatim in an earlier debate. The artist’s position,
although unstated, is clear: these forums are idealized as a
raw conversation about issues but are often just repeated
displays of political theater.
This particular video was crafted by combing through
debate transcripts and time-coding and synchronizing
video, and of course was possible only after the three
debates (and election) were over and comparisons could
be made. But imagine the presidential debates in 2016,
where today’s postmortem artistic statement becomes a
real-time filter, thanks to the ability to access prior video
mere milliseconds after the candidate says a phrase and
to persuasively visualize those repetitions in real time,
ultimately affecting voters’ impressions before an election.
Dynamically-generated visual filters like these, nascent
now, will become vitally important in the future.
Force Seven:
Awe-gmented
Reality
Expressing and detecting emotion becomes
a persuasive layer in our interactions with
technology.
Emotion will be an increasingly important component of
persuasive technologies over the next decade. The rise of
social media is, in large part, about the human desire to
connect more intensely and the search for fresh, compel-
ling ways to reach out and touch one another. Real-time
video, avatars, Facebook comments, even the simple text
message: all afford different emotional expressions. In
the coming decade, new findings in brain and behavioral
sciences will continue to uncover genetic and neurologi-
cal bases of emotions that will open up novel forms of
intervention. Increasingly sophisticated facial and gestural
recognition software will allow us to mine our physical
responses for new clues into emotion. The Network on
My Shoulder will bring our emotional awareness of others,
and others’ awareness of our emotional state, into more
corners of our lives. And Digital Mirrors will shape our self-
perceptions by reflecting back the emotional content of our
digital trails.
Many personal devices already or will soon aim video cam-
eras at our faces as we interact with them, from the tiny
cameras built into the top of most laptop monitors to the
newest mobile phones like the iPhone 4, with its cameras
both in back of the handset and facing frontward toward
the user’s face. The potential for many of the technologies
in our lives to know something of our emotional state and
adapt accordingly is closer than not.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfd5g8Y_Jqo

Mashup artist 236.com created this video,
which repurposed clips from the 2008
presidential debates, overlapping clips
every time a candidate repeated a phrase
he had used earlier.
18

23.
THE REMAKING OF PERSUASION: SEVEN FORCES AT PLAY
Translating emotions
What start out as assistive technologies for people with
disabilities often result in mainstream applications down the
line. Researchers at the MIT Media Lab have created a pro-
totype called the Self-Cam, part of a larger Social Emotional
Sensing Toolkit. The Self-Cam is a wearable camera and
computer for people with autism that analyzes its wearer’s
facial expressions and head movements and reports back
which of six states of mind the wearer may be conveying to
others: agreeing, disagreeing, interested, confused, concen-
trating, or thinking. Gaze-based interfaces, facial expression
analysis, and head position analysis are already being de-
veloped to increase the efficacy of online social interactions
between virtual agents and humans as well.
Similar work at Stanford’s VHIL to detect expressions is
demonstrating that what we project on our faces may also
be predictive of our future behaviors. As the VHIL puts it,
facial expressions are “true reflections of internal intent,
allowing us to predict future behaviors.” Within two minutes
of detecting participants’ faces in an experiment about
online shopping, the VHIL’s algorithm to detect micro-
expressions was able to accurately predict whether the
participant would make a purchase or was only doing virtu-
al window-shopping. These kinds of emotional translation
tools will play an increasingly important role for all kinds of
“assisted” interactions in the coming decade, whether they
be human-human, machine-human, real world, or virtual.
Sending touch
Of course faces are not the only means by which we
signal our emotional state. An emerging body of research
is discovering that touch can be a remarkably expressive
medium for conveying emotion, and receiving a touch a
powerful precursor to changing attitudes and behaviors. In
one experiment, a sympathetic touch from a doctor gave
people the impression that the visit lasted twice as long.7
The growing ability to embed circuits in everyday objects
that are wirelessly connected to online networks is creat-
ing new traction for digital forms of touch. Touch is even
meeting the Networks on My Shoulder, as in an MIT Media
Lab prototype of a “haptic social network.” Called Stress
OutSourced (SOS), a jacket outfitted with small vibra-
tors across the back becomes an intermediary between
people in need of a stress-relieving pat.8
Supportive online
networks could offer to provide that virtual touch when
needed. The placement of the vibrators also indicates the
geographic origin of the touch—a touch from someone
within 10 miles will be felt closest to the spine, while an
international supporter would be felt on the periphery. We
can easily imagine future versions of the SOS concept that
are self-contained, whereby Digital Mirrors or Telepathic
Technologies detect our negative moods and automatically
deliver increasingly lifelike affirming touches.
The power of awe
The name of this force, “awe-gmented reality,” is of course
a pun on the technology of augmented reality. This twist
was inspired by a recent finding that should trigger a
feeling of optimism for anyone invested in the future of
persuasion. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania
discovered that among the most emailed stories—those
that ultimately went viral—from all the news stories on
The New York Times website were those that exhibited a
quality they termed “awe.” These stories were typically
more positive than negative, considered ideas on a grand
scale, and ultimately suggested that the world was a
large and mysterious place. The stories required “mental
accommodation.” As one researcher put it, when people
feel something like this, they are compelled to share
that sensation. The potential to design a reality that is
continually connected by the inspiring emotion of awe is
an exciting reason to be hopeful as we move ahead.
www.lauren-mccarthy.com/happinesshat/

If activating your smile muscles leads to an immediate im-
provement in mood, might we start persuading ourselves to
happiness by tools like the Happiness Hat? Artist Lauren
McCarthy created this deliberately provocative wearable
device that detects whether its wearer’s cheek is raised high
enough to be smiling and, if not, pricks with a tack in the back
of the head until smiling begins.
19

24.
INSTITUTE FOR THE FUTURE | The Future of Persuasion
flickr.com/streamishmc
20

25.
PERSUASIVE DESIGN/PERSUASIVE DEFENSE
The dynamic between the two sides of persuasion will be played out for all of us to some extent, as we move
into a world of aware environments and high-resolution digital reflections. How can you, as an individual, use the
forces of persuasion to design a better future and also to protect yourself against the designs of others?
Persuasive Design/
Persuasive Defense
Design the most beneficial and supportive network.
People influence us simply by being in our networks, whether
as a source of motivational support or to set a mainstream
baseline for comparison and conformity. Knowing this, pick
the right people: turn digital mirrors on those in your network
to see what gets reflected back; learn what you may not know
about them and what influence they could be having on you.
Consider designing the “right” social network—not just people
who will be active supporters but also those whose proximal
influence will improve your health, happiness, productivity, and
ultimate well-being.
Design systems and triggers to motivate your future self.
A somewhat dystopian vision for this persuasive future is one
of surveillance, where lingering outside a fast-food restaurant
for too long automatically sends an alert to a snooping doctor.
But lead users—people who are writing custom programs and
triggers on their location-aware phones—are reclaiming this
power for their own goals. They are using telepathic technolo-
gies to time-travel, acting today to program whichever form of
motivation they will need when they pass a certain location,
trigger a condition, or in the future.
Design the ultimately persuasive reality for yourself.
It may seem silly that we are motivated by earning badges or
seeing tiny modified digital versions of ourselves, but it turns
out that we are. To meet your goals, be an early adopter of
these persuasive techniques. Set up game rewards for the
goals you want to meet. Spend 20 minutes a day as an avatar
that is taller for confidence, or watch your avatar eat healthily
or have a productive day. Morph your face with your boss’s to
get that promotion.
Defend against your autonomous network identity.
Know what your automated identity says about you. Use digital
mirrors to reflect your own behaviors, and watch emerging tools
like online privacy service ReputationDefender, which ambitious-
ly claims to provide “total awareness of your online presence.”
The merchants of digital mirrors, like TweetPsych, won’t likely
be revealing their algorithms, so it falls upon us to learn their
systems. Test them, hack them, game them. But above all know
what they say about you, because as behavioral confirmation
suggests, others’ expectations of you today may subtly become
your behaviors tomorrow.
Defend against interfaces that reduce your options.
Telepathic technologies in a no-click world will adapt by reduc-
ing options when they sense we are frustrated or overloaded.
This simplification will take the form of pared-down displays,
less data, or devices that just do something for us automatically.
But sometimes being overwhelmed is a good thing, sometimes
we will be better than software at figuring out patterns, and
sometimes an abundance of choice may be just what we need
to keep our brains sharp. Look for tools that provide information
but still let you make the decisions.
Defend against persuasion beyond the senses.
We’re going to need a significant update to our media literacy.
One defense against subliminal persuasion, currently being
debated, is a ban on, or mandatory labeling of, images that have
been heavily retouched by Photoshop image software, particu-
larly photographs of models in ads and magazine covers. “These
photos can lead people to believe in a reality that does not exist,”
warns French parliamentarian Valérie Boyer, building on evidence
that these often grossly-exaggerated images can alter attitudes—
starting with lowered self-esteem—and ultimately affect behaviors
through eating disorders and body dysmorphia.
21
Design for persuasion Defend against persuasion

26.
INSTITUTE FOR THE FUTURE | The Future of Persuasion
Persuading People to Care
What could possibly persuade someone in California or Massachusetts to care
enough about urban blight and the future of the city of Detroit that they would invest
their own money in it? LOVELAND, a Detroit-focused organization pioneering new
approaches to engagement, is prototyping answers to this question by selling land—
one inch at a time.
Jerry Paffendorf, micro–real estate developer and creator of LOVELAND, sees the project as “crowd-
creating a new kind of city” in down-and-out areas of Detroit. The project invites participants to buy
one-square-inch properties within a 10,000-square-inch lot. Investors are given a deed to their acquisi-
tion and a magnifying glass so that they can survey their new territory.
A key part of this story is LOVELAND’s ongoing campaign to persuade people of the value of their
decidedly unconventional approach. As one strategy for accomplishing this, Paffendorf has made par-
ticipation in LOVELAND a unique game experience. The project has developed its story around “Inchy,”
a one-square-inch character, eager to participate in an urban renaissance for his beloved Detroit, a city
where the population has dwindled to less than half of what it was in the city’s peak in the 1950s.
That is just the beginning, however. LOVELAND has
created a full cast of characters and a backstory for their
tiny municipality. As a result, the LOVELAND team has
already sold all of the properties in their initial lot and is
in the process of bootstrapping the creation of additional
properties.
Paffendorf credits the venture’s success to its decision
to locate in a less populated city, its application of digital
world concepts to the physical world, the creation of a
framework for relationship building, and the encourage-
ment of personal creativity.
The lesson from LOVELAND is that fundraising for solu-
tions to tough social problems can be made much easier
by being made entertaining—that social investing can be
made not out of guilt or anxiety but out of delight
and hope.
22

28.
INSTITUTE FOR THE FUTURE | The Future of Persuasion
flickr.com/streamishmc/
24

29.
TECHNICAL FOUNDATIONS
Powerful trends in information technologies will enable continuing waves of innovation in persuasive experiences. We have
identified three technology clusters that are foundational in this development:
Technical Foundations
Combinatorial effects for amplified persuasion
1. WORLDWIDE WEBS OF SEMANTICALLY LINKED
PEOPLE, DATA, AND THINGS
We are creating an enormous number of digital artifacts
from all domains of our lives, as illustrated in the figure
below. We can choose either to share or to protect this
personal data, using them to update friends and family or
releasing them to be mined by third parties. We may not
think of them as being related to persuasion, but once
they enter the digital world, they are fodder for dissemina-
tion and analysis—they become platforms for persuasive
intervention.
Web graph analysis:
With the dramatic increase in the number of digital artifacts
that we are producing, there is an inexorable drive to make
sense of it all—to understand how the artifacts are linked,
and the meanings of our connections. Web graph analysis is
the new frontier for creating meaning and value out of these
artifacts. The value is in the graph of connections between
linked entities. A few examples:
• Google’s Page Rank: Values a Web page’s relevance
for search results based on the weight of the links to
that page, and the links to those pages. Google uses a
constantly evolving set of algorithms but essentially the
highest ranked pages are listed first.
1. Worldwide webs of semantically
linked people, data, and things:
These will enable us to create new
persuasive experiences by visualizing,
sharing, and mining complex informa-
tion about our lives.
2. Supercharged human-machine inter-
actions: Multicore supercomputing
chips and cloud-served supercomput-
ing are providing new affordances,
recognizing our speech, our languag-
es, our gestures, and our faces, and
instantly rendering intensely natural
and intelligent interactions.
3. Immersive media venues: Comput-
ing, video and mobile technologies are
rapidly converging to support seam-
less, multisensory 3D and tactile digital
interactions.
Health
&
Fitness
Civics
Work
Media
Information
Education
Social
Networks
Commerce
&
Banking
Personal
Identity
Ecology
Friend Nets
Dietary Logs
Lifeblog Recordings
Address Books
Distribution Lists
Network Accounts
Aliases & Handles
Avatars
Bookmarks
Recommendations
Subscriptions
Web, Blog, & Wiki IDs
Media Nets
Games & Virtual Worlds
Locative Media
Media Preferences
Accounts & Logins
Wish Lists
Purchases
Preferences
Biometrics
Personal Profiles
Legal History
Biometrics & Sensor Data
Medical Records
Exercise Data
Licenses
Registrations
Permissions
Ownership
Records
Workspaces
Data & Servers
Training & Certification
Accounts & Logins
Keys & Signatures
Subscriptions

Personal Identity Ecology:
experiences are filtered
through personal digital
identities and contexts.
25

30.
INSTITUTE FOR THE FUTURE | The Future of Persuasion
• Semantic graphs of linked data: Early Web pages
were connected with simple links or URLs. Now
we are building huge semantic Webs of linked data
(not just pages) based on a consensus grammar for
digital relationships, called the Resource Description
Framework (RDF). We can use RDF to establish simple
connections between entities and to describe the nature
of the relationship between those entities. For example,
RDF can use the information that “Flipper is a dolphin,”
and “dolphins are mammals,” to infer that “Flipper is
a mammal.”
• Semantic graphs of social networks: Social networks
are generating millions of digital artifacts that, at first
glance, can appear incoherent. However, the relation-
ships they reveal can be linked by a “social graph” in
the same way that digital objects can be linked by a
web graph. These social graphs look at the relation-
ships not only between people but also between people
and digital objects. The analysis of social graphs is also
strongly based on RDF grammar, allowing machines to
make inferences from the relationships uncovered. Open
Social Graph, for example, is an emerging Web standard
for these social graphs that was recently endorsed by
Facebook. Now, both humans and machines can begin
to decipher the relationships and qualities of our social
networks using sophisticated inference engines and
other semantic computing techniques. Facebook has
already experimented with this to some degree, by min-
ing information to explore things like “the happiest days
of the year,” based on when people say they like things.
Sensors
Not all digital artifacts arise in the social sphere, however;
many are created by electronic sensors. We are starting
to wear sensors to measure our fitness and to monitor our
health and are installing a huge variety of sensors in our
households that will provide the raw data for machine infer-
ence. This is likely to lead to future assistive environments.
Similarly, hundreds of sensors and MEMs (Micro Electro
Mechanical systems) are being embedded within our cars.
Vehicle companies are just beginning to explore how these
sensors and probes can be harnessed persuasively to im-
prove the safety and economies of our driving. As a result,
we are starting to be surrounded by what could be called
telepathic machinery—and making sense of it requires real
computing power.
2. SUPERCHARGED HUMAN-MACHINE INTERACTIONS
In the future, we will look back at typewriting interaction
with computers as a quaint relic, like tapping Morse code
dots and dashes over a telegraph. User experience is rap-
idly moved from sharing text, to sharing images and vid-
eos, to sharing direct sensory experiences—from sounds
and sights, to touch and mood. We will use technologies
to learn much more about who we are, about the people
we interact with, and ultimately about what it means to be
human. Companies like Google will offer a new class of in-
teractive services. These computation-intensive processes
will make use of the growing scale and supercomputing
power of cloud computing, and will require large-scale pat-
tern recognition, data mining, inference, machine learning,
and complex interactive models and analytics.
Multicore, cloud-served computing
Multicore and cloud computing are enabling us to com-
pletely rethink the kinds of computer and human interac-
tions that are possible. New cloud-enabled models of
interaction use will provide more intimate and responsive
experiences by enabling people to, for example, carry on
online conversations with other people in other cultures in
their native languages.
Google now has more than one million CPUs harnessed
into a single operating system to instantaneously answer
queries requiring millions of simultaneous instructions.
This can be used, for example, to compare the patterns of
a spoken voice with millions of stored patterns of sounds
of words, and to transcribe speech to text. Other emerg-
ing applications compare a picture of a face with millions
of other faces, to recognize who the person is in a camera
viewfinder.
Supercharged interactions between people and media
are already used for high-end biometric authentication of
fingerprints, retinas, handprints, and sound prints for high-
security applications. These capabilities are now migrating
down to common, ordinary experiences like:
• Automatic speech recognition
• Real-time language translation
• Mining vast social graphs
• Visual search by sending an image to a search engine
• Gestural interfaces with games and media
All of these capabilities require massive computing re-
sources to compare a simple pattern with millions of stored
patterns to infer a meaning. This is only possible with mod-
ern multicore, and cloud-served, supercomputers.
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TECHNICAL FOUNDATIONS
3. IMMERSIVE MEDIA VENUES FOR PERSUASION
The same high-performance supercomputing resources are
also giving us enormous new powers to create simulations
that are “realer than real,” based on rendering combined
with complex modeled behaviors and interactions. These
technologies will allow us to amplify our imagination by
creating environments that are photorealistic and that we
can accept as real. Applications include:
• High-resolution simulations: Our video games and
video media, business and scientific visualizations and
our educational media will be able to display massively
complex dynamic models of both real and imaginary
phenomena, like histories, natural ecologies, and human
physiologies.
• Photorealistic graphics and animation with syn-
thetic actors: High-performance computing can render
computer-generated images with such precision resolu-
tion that these synthetic experiences cannot be visually
distinguished from the physical world.
Ubiquitous video
Video is becoming ubiquitous, appearing on our mobile
devices and displays in our homes, workplaces and in
public, and on millions of Internet channels. As it becomes
integrated with the Internet, in software and in Web-
enabled televisions, video objects will become more
interactive, offering us clickable, linked Web objects.
Television networks and television manufactures are
making the necessary investments to provide quality 3D
experiences to us for a new generation of televisions
and projection environments. Finally, we are beginning to
experience videos linked to our locations, triggered by GPS
and by barcode-like patterns. (For more in-depth analysis
of video, please see IFTF’s Future of Video report, available
at www.iftf.org/FutureofVideoReport.)
Augmented reality
The first Web browsers enabled us to view hyper-linked
media on a page. Now the smart phone viewfinder is
becoming a Web browser to view and interact with digital
linked media, attached to the real world. Mobile users are
already experiencing the first generation of augmented
reality, using apps like Layar, Wikitude, and Junaio. Further
applications in development include augmented real-
ity glasses, enhanced vehicle windows, and ultimately,
digitally augmented contact lenses. The underlying data is
often geo-coded, or identified with latitude and longitude,
and for future augmented reality applications, information
about the elevation of the digital object will also probably
have to be included. These first-generation viewers are so
far showing only a few narrow glimpses of a growing mass
of geo-coded data and media.
There is a flood of location-based map data, geo-coded
Web pages, and live sensor data available on the Web
using new open standards like Keyhole Markup Language,
a map description language used by Google Maps and
Google Earth. The beauty of these standard codes is
that ideally, they can be viewable on any browser, just as
an html Web page can be viewed by any Web browser.
Unfortunately however, our GPS equipped phones can’t
calculate location accurately enough to display geo-coded
objects more precisely than 5-20 meters. This is a technical
limitation of both GPS, and of the data itself. Most geo-
coded information does not yet include precise 3D coordi-
nates (latitude, longitude, and elevation).
Most first general smart phone AR applications rely on the
GPS and an internal compass to show viewers only the
general location of the data. This works sufficiently well
for finding a coffee shop, but not well enough to provide
information about the fine detail of an object or place in
view. However, new technical developments will enable
both creation and viewing of precisely located digital ob-
jects. Big technology companies like Nokia, Microsoft, and
Google are beginning to precisely locate digital objects by
comparing the image in the view to a stored pattern. Using
their vast network of computers and massive database of
images, Google’s Goggles visual search application can
identify a picture of a place, like the Golden Gate bridge,
and eventually will be able to calculate the “pose” of a
camera, the field of view, and the precise distance of the
viewer from the object in view. Nokia’s Point and Find, and
Microsoft’s Photosynth work similarly, and will ultimately
offer the same capability for people to both add a precisely
located annotation to the real world and to discover the
digital information attached to physical places.
By 2015, we will begin to see this kind of digital augmen-
tation seamlessly through the first generation of special
eyeglasses equipped to show digital data overlaid on the
real world. By 2020, it is possible that these glasses will
not be necessary and that we will see the new digital world
directly through special wireless contact lenses, already
in development in University of Washington labs and
elsewhere.
Just as the hypertext Web changed the way we interact
with text, these new augmented reality technologies will
change the way we behave in the physical world. It is
important that we begin to think now about the implica-
tions of physical space transformed into information space.
Clearly, we will not want to see everything online about
everything we see. We will have to develop new ways to
query and filter the views of potentially vast amounts of
information in any place aggregated from thousands of
digital objects describing the physical environment. This
sorting process will be central to the future of persuasion.
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33.
APPLICATIONS
We’ve identified transformative forces and emerging technology clusters that are transforming the future of per-
suasion. They will have profound effects on storytelling, argumentation, and influence across all domains of daily
life. We’ve chosen four core areas to explore more deeply: advertising, health, learning, and governance. In each,
we will see new persuasive voices emerge, from among others, our networks, the surfaces around us, or our own
digital reflections. Ads will become so persuasive that we won’t even think of them as ads. Learning, at its best,
will be highly responsive to what students are actually doing, making knowledge more accessible to the human
brain. More of us will be able to get ourselves to make those changes in personal health that have stymied so
many of us for so long—eating better, staying more active. And everyday political discussions will be more com-
plex than ever before, incorporating new forms of action. Read on to find out what this might mean for you.
Applications
Advertising, health, learning, governance
MARKETS:
ADVERTISING EVERYWHERE AND NOWHERE
The arms race between advertisers and consumers is
poised to escalate, with advertisers using the tools of data
mining, geo-location, and neurotechnology to take precise
aim at their target markets. Indeed, the very definition of
a target market will shift from demographics and psycho-
graphics to specific individuals whose desires and aspi-
rations are revealed by their digital trails online and their
actions in the physical world.
Meanwhile, tomorrow’s generation of data-savvy young
people, with media creation as their first language, will
develop resistance against intrusive new forms of context-
aware, highly personalized advertising. After all, who wants
to be a “target”? They will be fluent in the language of
marketing, and they will be advertisers themselves, seeking
public engagement in their own creations. By becoming
practitioners of persuasion, they will more easily recognize
when media is being used to control or manipulate them.
Additionally, everyone will have access to the same data,
which right now is the most valuable currency in the per-
suasion economy.
As a result, companies will feel pushed toward more
invasive forms of persuasion, drawing from advances in
neuroscience. Yet research on the psychology of happiness
shows that we “buy” ourselves the greatest happiness
when we spend our money on social activities or things
that lead to greater social connectedness. Out of this tug
of war between empowered consumers and new advertis-
ing practices bolstered by science and technology, the real
truth in advertising will finally emerge: the product is the
story, and it has to sell itself.
A market segment of one
As cyberspace becomes a layer on top of our existing
reality, online advertising will shift into the physical realm.
As described in Persuasive Force Three, Telepathic
Technologies, location-based ads are already being
piloted. But advertisers are not the only ones who will take
advantage of location-enabled services. Individuals will
be able to leave “digital graffiti,” with their own product
reviews right outside the stores or even inside, next to
particular products.
In a world where the digital and physical merge into a
blended reality, every one of our actions, experiences, and
decisions becomes a data point. As we go about our daily
lives, we are generating a digital trail that, now and forever,
can be mined to reveal patterns about our past, our pres-
ent, and possibly our future. In the near term, advertisers
will use these digital trails for intensified contextual and
behavioral targeting, delivering advertising online that is
informed by data about the websites we visit, the searches
we conduct, our purchase histories, and the clues these
trails offer about who we are as individuals.
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As more data is collected and combined and as the sci-
ence of analysis improves, the advertisements delivered to
us will become highly personalized. With advertising and
product placement creeping into all facets of our lives—
from billboards with 3D video to mobile AR experiences—
perhaps the positive side is that the ads will increasingly be
for products and services we might actually want to buy.
Signal: Monetizing content through meaning
Today, marketers using systems like Google AdWords bid
on the keywords on websites with the goal of delivering
relevant ads adjacent to a site’s content. However, many
words have multiple meanings, and content can be very
eclectic, making it difficult for automated systems to glean
context. OpenAmplify’s Web service for advertisers is
built on academic research on natural language process-
ing. According to the company, OpenAmplify “reads and
understands every word used” in e-mail, websites, tweets,
or searches, and “identifies the significant topics, brands,
people, perspectives, emotions, actions, and timescales”
to deliver highly targeted ads in context.
Advertising will move into all our digital channels, and the
ads will be so relevant to our conversations, activities, and
experiences at any given moment that the line between
advertising and everything else we are doing will blur.9
Signal: Following in your digital footprints
Of course, as our digital lives move from the screen to the
real world, highly contextual advertising will follow. MIT
researchers have pioneered methods for what they call
Reality Mining: collecting and analyzing bulk data from
mobile devices to paint an accurate picture of human social
behavior and even predict individuals’ future activities.
The MIT research led to the formation of Sense Networks,
a firm that helps its clients “understand customers and
anticipate needs in order to deliver accurate recommen-
dation, personalization and discovery—better than ever
before—without retaining customers’ original location
data.” For example, the company’s Citysense application
uses location data from your mobile phone to learn your
patterns of movement. Based on that historical information,
it can then recommend places you might enjoy. For retail-
ers, it could provide insight into where consumers actually
shop and how far they are willing to travel for a particular
product or service.10
www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBaiKsYUdvg&feature=related
www.openamplify.com/page/about/

OpenAmplify is a Web service for advertisers built on natural
language processing.

In the movie, Minority Report, Tom Cruise’s character
attempts to evade police, but is instantly identified by digital
billboards delivering personalized advertisements.
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35.
APPLICATIONS
Consuming happiness
On the heels of the recession and the related drop in con-
sumer spending in the United States, scientists are gaining
new insight into the age-old question of whether money re-
ally can buy happiness. At the intersection of neuroscience,
behavioral economics, and positive psychology, a science of
happiness is emerging. For example, studies are consistently
showing that while spending money on “stuff” does make
us happy to a point—we have to feed, clothe, and house
ourselves—we get the most satisfaction and are “happiest”
when we buy social activities and connectedness.
As learning from the science of happiness diffuses into
the public consciousness, we will see a shift in consumer
spending. Some people may buy experiences rather than
goods, while others may decrease consumption across the
board. Advertising will be affected in two ways: first, we
will see an increase in marketing as companies scramble to
fight a reduction in consumption; then, companies will be
forced to rethink what they have to sell, perhaps leading to
more focus on innovating around intangible products and
services. Even if the products do remain the same, the way
companies persuade us to buy them will be very different.
Signal: Finding happiness in experiences, not things
According to Stanford University researchers, marketing
campaigns that are focused on the experience of a product
more than possession of the product are much more ef-
fective. Just think of catchy slogans like “It’s Miller Time”
and Citibank’s “Live Richly.” In 2009, Ph.D. candidate
Cassie Mogilner and her colleagues studied hundreds of
magazine ads and ran simple experiments to determine
how marketing references to “time” and ”money” affected
consumer decisions and satisfaction. “Ultimately, time is
a more scarce resource—once it’s gone, it’s gone—and
therefore more meaningful to us,” says Mogilner, who led
the research. “How we spend our time says so much more
about who we are than does how we spend our money ...
When you refer to time, there is a big social component
that integrates the products you use with the people in your
life, which makes the product experience more meaningful
and richer.”11
Signal: Spending on others
In 2008, researchers found that spending money on oth-
ers promotes happiness more than buying for oneself.
Elizabeth Dunn and Lara Aknin of the University of British
Columbia, Michael Norton of Harvard Business School,
and their colleagues surveyed more than 600 people. They
found that those who engaged in “prosocial spending”—
gifts and charity—were happier. Then they looked at how
another group who had received bonuses at work spent
their money, and how happy they were. “We found that
spending more of one’s income on others predicted greater
happiness,” the researchers reported in their scientific
paper.12
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INSTITUTE FOR THE FUTURE | The Future of Persuasion
Brains and brands
You say you prefer Pepsi to Coke, but what do you re-
ally think? The field of neuromarketing aims to use brain
imaging and electroencephalography (EEG) technology
to measure consumer preference and the effectiveness of
advertising by observing how various stimuli affect brain
activity: Which commercial is more persuasive? What
package design is most alluring? As we learn more about
the brain, neuromarketing will become another tool in the
advertising arsenal.
However, the fact that a particular kind of music lights up
a certain region of your brain does not mean that hearing
that tune next time will make you choose one brand of
soap over another. More likely, what we learn about how
the brain works will result in various “marketing cocktails”
of stimuli—auditory, visual, and even smells—that trigger
certain emotional states or product brand associations.
While the line between the brain scan and the “buy” but-
ton is not as direct as some advertisers might hope, large
marketing firms will almost certainly start recruiting from
university neuroscience programs. Protests will certainly
follow, raising valid concerns about subliminal influence,
the use of mind control for marketing, and the fact that
access to that data will be controlled by the companies
rather than the individuals who opened their minds to the
marketers. Neuromarketing for persuasion will be a volatile
subject, and one that most companies will have to manage
very carefully.
Signal: Measuring brainwaves for messaging
London-based firm Mindmetic’s website reads like the
description of an imaginary evil company in a science
fiction novel: “Mind-reading technology!” “Predicting pre-
conscious emotional response!” “Revolutionizing market
research by revealing true emotions!” The technology
consists of 128 EEG sensors placed on the head to mea-
sure electrical activity in the brain in response to marketing
stimuli. European ad firm Bark Group signed on as a client
“to leverage this state-of-the-art technology to craft higher-
efficacy campaigns, to design copy and advertisements
that are tailored to elicit both conscious and subconscious
consumer reactions.”13
Signal: Designing with biometrics
Campbell’s Soup Company recently announced their use
of biometrics, such as measurements of galvanic skin
response (moisture) and heart rate, to determine con-
sumer response to various product package designs. The
company partnered with Innerscope Research, a neuro-
marketing firm, and others, on a two-year research effort
that combined the biometric data with deep surveys about
Campbell’s as a brand and the experience of eating soup.14
HEALTH: TARGETING WELL-BEING
Although many of us are motivated to quit smoking, lose
weight, and exercise more in order to live healthier, longer
lives, changing our daily habits can be a difficult chal-
lenge. The future of self-persuasion looks good, though.
Embedded sensors and other forms of context-aware
technologies are beginning to provide opportunities for es-
sential “just-in-time” feedback that encourages us to make
healthier decisions in the moment, wherever we may be.
Smart devices already let us receive messages of praise or
encouragement, subtle suggestions, and will begin to de-
liver simulations that may lead us to change our behavior.
They also keep us connected to our social networks, which
can exert a powerful influence on us.
The challenge for the future of persuasion in health will be
to find the optimal balance between the pervasiveness of
these technologies and our willingness to be influenced
by them. Some people will embrace them; others, less
motivated to improve their health, will reject such technolo-
gies as intrusive. New insights into the underpinnings of
behavior change may help shift this delicate balance.
Ubiquitous computing for health
Imagine if the environments in which we live, work, and
play could communicate with us about our health—for
example, if our pill bottles could remind us to follow our
daily regimens, our office computers could tell us to take
a break when we get too stressed, or our smart phones
could let us know that we can join a friend who is exer-
cising nearby. We are starting to see embedded sensors
in everything, from the walls in our homes to the clothes
we wear, providing continuous wireless monitoring of our
biometrics and activities, and triggering the delivery of just-
in-time, contextualized, and customized feedback.
These pervasive platforms provide relevant information for
decision-making, suggest healthy behaviors, and con-
nect us to our social networks and health care teams for
encouragement and support. The messaging we receive
may take many forms, including simulations, visualizations,
or AR. For some, of course, the experience of pervasive
monitoring and feedback may feel too intrusive, so having
control over the technology will be important.
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APPLICATIONS
architecture.mit.edu/house_n/documents/PlaceLab.pdf
Signal: Making homes smart and persuasive
The term “smart home” can refer to a highly automated
environment in which processors control the heating, light-
ing, and other details. Taking this concept a step further,
new research and experimental smart homes, such as the
PlaceLab in Cambridge, MA, and the ORCATECH Living
Laboratory in Portland, OR15
, are being developed with
ubiquitous wireless sensors and context-aware computing
systems that can provide just-in-time persuasive interfaces
to residents.
One example of sensing technology that is being devel-
oped to help people be more mindful of their health behav-
ior is the MIT Media Lab’s ReflectOns, which they describe
as “mental prostheses that help people think about their
actions and change their behavior based on subtle, ambi-
ent nudges delivered at the moment of action.”16
The
prototype fork ReflectOn addresses the issue of weight
control without focusing on counting calories. Instead, it
takes into account several recent studies that have shown
that the old admonition, “wolfing down your food will make
you fat,” may be true, and that eating more slowly might
prevent weight gain.17
The fork measures the time between
bites and provides subtle haptic feedback when the user is
eating too quickly. Eventually, ReflectOn devices will fea-
ture unobtrusive sensors that can be embedded through-
out a smart home.
Signal: Prodding patients to take their medicine
Another company capitalizing on the move toward ubiq-
uitous computing is GlowCaps. By simply integrating a
timing system into a standard prescription bottle, they
have managed to dramatically increase the timeliness of
pharmaceutical treatments. Prescription bottles equipped
with GlowCaps first glow to indicate that it is time to take
medication, then play an increasingly loud ringtone before
finally sending a patient a text message reminder. In dem-
onstration, this simple innovation increased adherence to
medication schedules among people with hypertension
from 61 to 98%.18
www.consciousanima.net/projects/reflectons/&
cfb.media.mit.edu/research/ambient-intelligence/
reflectons-persuasive-objects-think/

Prototype of a ReflectOn sensor, which provides
real-time feedback to the user.

PlaceLab is an apartment-scale shared research
facility where new technologies and concepts
can be tested in an everyday living environment.
www.rxvitality.com

GlowCaps fit on regular prescription bottles and
provide alerts indicating that it’s time to take
medication.
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INSTITUTE FOR THE FUTURE | The Future of Persuasion
Rewards for healthy behavior
We know it is not easy to consistently make decisions that
are good for our health. Would it help if we were rewarded
for engaging in healthy behaviors, not only with improved
health outcomes in the long term but also with immedi-
ate incentives? Principles of behavioral economics can
move us in that direction, particularly when combined
with elements of game play. Technology makes it easier to
decrease people’s natural tendency to discount how a de-
cision today will affect their health in the future, by making
small but tangible rewards for healthy behavior available to
them in the short term.
In their 2008 book, Nudge, Richard Thaler and Cass Sun-
stein presented the concept of choice architecture, which
includes creating opportunities (“nudges”) that make a
healthy choice easier or more desirable (that is, by provid-
ing rewards). In a recent blog post about Let’s Move, a
government program dedicated to solving the childhood
obesity epidemic, Thaler and Sunstein noted that getting
children to exercise for an hour a day will be one of the key
nudges involved in the program.20
Signal: Competing for exercise points
Switch2Health (S2H) is a company that seeks to motivate
tweens and teens to exercise by rewarding them for physi-
cal activity. Its S2H REPLAY21
is a sophisticated wrist-worn
device that combines a multi-axis activity sensor with
proprietary algorithms that verify that the user has engaged
in continuous moderate intensity physical activity (such as
brisk walking, playing tag, or jumping rope) for 60 minutes
(divided into 20 three-minute segments). It then generates
a 12-digit encrypted code that users enter on the S2H
website; points are earned and accumulated toward a
variety of rewards. S2H.com also features a leaderboard,
which promotes “healthy competition” by encouraging us-
ers to move up the board by being more physically active.
Signal: Rewarding kids with diabetes for
glucose monitoring
A similar technique is employed by a blood glucose moni-
tor, called the Didget, that Bayer has begun producing for
children with diabetes. The monitor interfaces with the
portable Nintendo DS game system and rewards players
with points when they check blood glucose levels. Points
accumulate to unlock new game levels and to purchase
customized in-game items.
www.s2h.com

Switch2Health has partnered with
a community youth health program
sponsored by Paul Pierce, the
captain of the Boston Celtics.
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APPLICATIONS
Healthy social connections
What if your friends and family could help you get
healthier without nagging you about it? Recent studies
have shown that social networks play a significant role in
our health, spreading behaviors related to obesity, smok-
ing, and even happiness.22
Although social networks are
not new, online social networking platforms are. Stanford
professor BJ Fogg believes that Facebook in particular
is a revolutionary persuasive medium because it makes
possible what he calls “mass interpersonal persuasion.”23
Other emerging technologies, including location-aware
mobile applications such as Loopt, provide greater op-
portunities for us to connect with others. These tools also
use social norms and accountability as motivating forces
to help people regulate the way they behave. Game ele-
ments are often incorporated, and game designers are
also creating experiences that incorporate online plat-
forms, geo-location technology, and mobile devices with
social elements that subtly encourage physical activity.
Signal: Helping friends lose weight
SMART (Social/Mobile Approach to Reduce Weight) is
intended to harness the influence and power of social
networks to improve weight-related behaviors in young
adults.24
It currently uses a combination of mobile phone
and Facebook applications, but its design encourages
new applications to develop virally and recognizes that
new technologies will emerge over time. Its intervention
elements are intended to be accessible, appealing,
and fun. Tapping into social norms is one strategy: if all
your friends are using tracking technology to measure
their activity levels, you will be inclined to do so as well.
Encouragement and social pressure are also strong
motivators.25
Signal: Leveraging social commitments
A commitment contract obligates you to achieve a spe-
cific goal within a particular time frame, and puts your
reputation at stake for failing to reach your goal. StickK.
com, developed by Yale professors Dean Karlan and Ian
Ayres, is based on the principle that assigning account-
ability is a key factor to behavior change.26
The site lets
your social network know when you fail to keep your end
of the bargain, motivating you to save face by living up to
set expectations.
www.stickk.com

Stickk works as an accountability
engine, alerting your social network
when you’ve failed to keep your end
of a bargain or deal.
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Virtual therapies
Virtual reality (VR) technology can help you conquer your
fears, relieve your anxieties, and improve your interpersonal
skills in the real world by immersing you in a virtual one. It
can also play a role in changing behaviors related to smok-
ing and eating habits. VR technology integrates real-time
computer graphics, body-tracking sensors, audio/visual/
touch displays, and sensory input devices to immerse a
participant in an interactive computer-generated virtual en-
vironment (VE). The user’s orientation and gaze change the
VE in a continuous, natural way, and the addition of haptic
interfaces produces desired action and provides tactual
sensory feedback.
VR allows for precise control over complex, immersive,
and dynamic 3D stimulus presentations that can uniquely
target a variety of psychological, cognitive, and physical
disorders for systematic testing and treatment. VEs provide
a fundamental advancement in how human functioning can
be addressed in many health-related situations.
Signal: Experiencing virtual cognitive-behavioral therapy
VR has been successfully used as a form of exposure
therapy in the treatment of phobias, anxieties, and post-
traumatic stress disorder. More recently, psychologist
Giuseppe Riva and colleagues have developed Experiential
Cognitive Therapy (ECT), which integrates VR technology
with principles of cognitive-behavioral therapy to modify
body image perceptions and eating habits in the treatment
of eating disorders and obesity.27
Other emerging applica-
tions include addressing addictions and attention deficit/
hyperactivity disorder.
Riva is the head researcher behind the NeuroVR28
initiative,
a free, open-source VR platform that provides clinical pro-
fessionals with a cost-free VE editor, allowing non-expert
users to easily modify VEs to best suit the needs of the
clinical setting. It offers not only a rich database of 2D and
3D objects that can easily be placed in a predesigned vir-
tual scenario, but also the option of adding new objects to
the database. This feature allows the therapist to enhance
the patient’s feeling of familiarity and intimacy with the VE
by using, for example, photos of objects or people that are
part of the patient’s daily life. The NeuroVR Player offers
the ability to use a head-mounted display to immerse the
patient in the VE.
Signal: Treating physical discomfort digitally
The deep attachment between people and their avatars
has opened new possibilities for management of pain
and discomfort. One recent application, for example, has
demonstrated that soldiers who have been the victims of
serious combat-related burns can palpably reduce their
levels of pain by entering a computer landscape of snow
and ice called SnowWorld.30
Interestingly, virtual immer-
sion in a cold climate even elicits many of the physiological
responses of actual treatments involving cooling.
NeuroVR

The NeuroVR Editor provides an easy-to-use, icon-based
interface. 29
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APPLICATIONS
LEARNING: BUILDING 21ST CENTURY KNOW-HOW
The structure of learning is changing. Advances in fields
such as neuroscience are increasing our understanding of
the optimal conditions for acquiring and retaining knowl-
edge and are allowing us to tailor learning experiences to
the information being conveyed. New approaches to teach-
ing are freeing learning from the classroom and studio.
Immersive simulations and games for learning can better
equip us with the capacity to adapt to multiple possible
outcomes.
Customized learning environments
Both teachers and students will possess a wide array of
new skills and technologies that will allow the creation of
unique, optimal conditions for learning. From neuroscience
research, it will be possible to pinpoint the amount of vi-
sual, verbal, and other sensory stimuli needed to optimally
enhance participation, memory, analysis, and other cogni-
tive processes. Furthermore, through the use of real-time,
bidirectional communications technologies, specific learn-
ing pathways will be continuously monitored and modi-
fied. Teachers will be able to identify when their students
are having difficulty grasping particular concepts and will
be able to fine-tune the content accordingly. Students will
simultaneously be able to indicate when they are confused
or when subject matter is being presented too slowly to
hold their attention.
Signal: Brain-targeted teaching
The Brain-Targeted Teaching Model, developed by Johns
Hopkins University Assistant Dean of Urban School
Partnerships Dr. Mariale Hardiman, links advances in
neuroscience with, among other things, physical class-
room conditions, teaching methodology, and modes of
evaluating student achievement. At Roland Park Elemen-
tary/Middle School, Hardiman used knowledge of brain
functions to develop and implement a number of Brain-
Targeted Teaching techniques. For example, since “scent
can also be used to enhance memory, as olfactory input
moves directly to the limbic system or emotional center,”31
kindergarten classrooms were scented with peppermint to
facilitate imprinting.
Signal: Customizing curricula
Innovations for Learning’s TeacherMate—a handheld
computer and set of instructional applications designed
for use in schools, at the cost of $100 per student—
provides teachers with the flexibility to differentially adapt
the presentation of a standard curriculum to meet the
learning progression of individual students. Each student’s
device provides the teacher with continuous data about
students’ performance and speed on particular exercises,
helping the teacher immediately identify where students are
encountering barriers to their academic progress.
www.braintargetedteaching.org

The Brain-Targeted Teaching Model,
developed by Dr. Mariale Hardiman.
www.innovationsforlearning.org/cms_demo.php

Screenshot from Innovation for
Learning’s TeacherMate.
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Connected self-empowerment
Pervasive mobile connectivity, combined with awareness of
location and context, will bring about large-scale changes
to what we learn, where we learn it, and who we learn
it from. Learning practical skills will be enhanced by the
ability to consult step-by-step video or AR instructions for
any task. From learning how to cook a new recipe to how
to tune a car’s engine, new worlds will be unlocked by this
capacity to consult highly detailed, contextually relevant
learning programs.
The ability to tap into the knowledge of specialized knowl-
edge communities, via services that can rapidly match
an individual’s queries with the resources for obtaining
answers, will help turn every moment of our lives into
an opportunity to learn. Trust and authority will become
increasingly valued, as students endeavor to ensure that
the individuals, data, and learning software they use are
comprehensive, responsive, and adaptive.
Signal: Augmenting the mechanics of learning
Research by Columbia University’s Steven Henderson and
Steven Feiner exemplifies the potential application for AR-
guided learning.32
Using customized commercially available
hardware, the team developed an AR application designed
to guide military mechanics through a number of standard
maintenance tasks. Given the high-complexity environ-
ments in which military mechanics must operate,
Henderson and Feiner made use of AR to help mechan-
ics locate objects and perform tasks more accurately and
rapidly than they could using non-augmented mechanics.
Signal: Tapping a world of resources
Self-empowered learning is contingent on solutions for
seamlessly and rapidly connecting individuals who have
questions to the resources that can provide relevant
answers. Social search engine Aardvark leverages individu-
als’ trust in their extended social networks to find the most
appropriate answer to requests for advice, opinions, or
factual inquiries.33
When users ask Aardvark a question via
the Web, IM, e-mail, Twitter, or iPhone, Aardvark’s routing
algorithm parses the query for its topic and then routes it
to other individuals based on factors such as their domain
of expertise, their prior history producing strong responses,
and how quickly they generally respond. Within a matter of
minutes, users can expect a variety of answers—answers
that are much more personalized and relevant than when
entering similar queries into a traditional search engine.
www.vark.com

Aardvark enables fast, personalized learning.
graphics.cs.columbia.edu/projects/armar/
pubs/henderson_feiner_ismar2009.pdf

AR overlay guides real-time tasks.
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APPLICATIONS
Games for learning
Games will be progressively more significant as peda-
gogical instruments. Not only will games increasingly be
entrusted with delivering standard curriculum, they will also
be used to provide realistic simulations of comparatively
rare situations and to convey multi-variable, complex sys-
tems by making abstract concepts accessible. By allowing
us to experience previously inaccessible conditions, these
games will enable us to broaden our understanding of how
the world works, or at least how it appears to work, from
perspectives other than our own, which will help us to build
better models of how events in our lives are likely to unfold.
Signal: Playing Politics
Developed by the University of Southern California Game
Innovation Lab, the Redistricting Game34
typifies the new
applications of games for learning. The game aims to make
the highly abstract concept of gerrymandering (redrawing
legislative districts, often to protect the seats of incum-
bents) tangible for the average citizen. Whereas traditional
education about the subject would explain the minutiae of
legal procedures and the historical reasons for the practice,
the Redistricting Game instead emphasizes experiential
learning.
Gamers are placed in the position of a legislator and are
asked to amend districts explicitly for their avatar’s benefit.
The game’s structure forces no moral judgments; however,
by simulating district redrawing, gamers see how much
manipulation and machination is required by gerrymander-
ers, and they come away with a richer understanding of
some of the actions of their elected officials.
Signal: Honing motor skills
Dutch games developer Grendel Games,35
in collaboration
with the Groningen University Hospital, is using games
on the Nintendo Wii to help maintain the proficiency of
the hospital’s surgeons. A recent health report by Dutch
officials found that due to lack of training in the motor
skills required by the surgeons, a number of errors were
being made during laparoscopic procedures. The report
recommended that staff be required to obtain certification
on simulations of the procedure, but the hospital found it
difficult to engage surgeons with simulations that were not
compelling. Driven also by the high cost of maintaining
comprehensive simulators, Grendel Games created a game
that uses modified Wii controllers to simulate the mechan-
ics of laparoscopy—without the game even appearing like
surgery. Surgeons were thus able to maintain and hone
their skills without consciously knowing that they were
learning by playing the game.
www.redistrictinggame.org/launchgame.php?level=basic&mission=4

The Redistricting Game places people in the
position of a legislator and amends districts to the
benefit of their avatar.
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GOVERNANCE: PERSUADING UP, PERSUADING DOWN
Voting, lobbying, polling, and other venerable forms of
political persuasion will continue to have an incumbent’s
advantage over start-up social and computational technol-
ogies. However, new ways of organizing, communicating,
and consolidating political opinion and desire will quickly
transform the ecosystem of persuasion on which govern-
ments, organizations, and citizens stake their futures.
Everyday citizens are becoming more sophisticated in how
they use social media to pool resources and information,
organize quickly and effectively, and “persuade up” by
increasing their influence with those who make decisions
that affect their lives. In the opposite direction, new per-
suasive technologies are allowing those in power to read,
reach, and influence the public with a single stroke.
The trend toward persuading up and persuading down in
real time is shifting the hierarchies of control and the bal-
ance of power that have traditionally defined governance.
A new communication landscape with a “govern-mentality”
toward persuasion is emerging.
Power and isolation
Research has shown that abuse of power rises relative to
the social and emotional distance between the ruler and
the ruled. Science journalist Jonah Lehrer recently de-
scribed this phenomenon:
Once we become socially isolated, we stop simulat-
ing the feelings of other people. As a result, our inner
Machiavelli takes over, and our sense of sympathy is
squashed by selfishness. The UC Berkeley psychologist
Dacher Keltner has found that, in many social situations,
people with power act just like patients with severe brain
damage. “The experience of power might be thought of
as having someone open up your skull and take out that
part of your brain so critical to empathy and socially-
appropriate behavior,” he writes. “You become very
impulsive and insensitive, which is a bad combination.”36
By decreasing social isolation, social networking, and com-
munication tools like Facebook, Twitter, and Skype open a
rich channel for leaders and their constituents to exchange
ideas, debate issues, and create dialogue. These channels
are not only important for the functional practice of open
government and deliberative democracy, but they also
help overcome many of the logistical barriers to meaningful
human contact that can blind leaders (in government, busi-
ness, and communities) to the needs of their constituents,
and often lead to poor or selfish decision-making. Few
technologies are more persuasive than human contact,
even virtual contact, and social media will make this con-
tact more pervasive and effective.
Signal: Connecting officials and citizens as
social networks
Besides the thousands of elected officials on Twitter and
Facebook, there are now dozens of sites and platforms
connecting officials and citizens as a social network. One
site, GovLoop, describes itself as the “Social Network for
Government.” Its vetted membership network claims over
25,000 “innovators from federal, state, and local govern-
ment.” This active community is a sounding board for new
ideas for governmental transparency, crowdsourcing, and
feedback.
Signal: Getting cities online
City governments are beginning to reap the benefit of so-
cial media outreach. A recent survey by the Fels Institute of
Government at the University of Pennsylvania showed that
of 79 U.S. city governments polled, 50% had a Facebook
page and 56% were on Twitter. In the report, Jeff Friedman,
Assistant Managing Director for the City of Philadelphia,
said, “The value for us is being able to reach so many
people at one time at zero cost. We are doing a great deal
of fantastic, transformational work and … we need to get
this out to people.”
Yet, despite the increasing numbers of cities using social
media, these tools are still not being used as they could
be. The survey found that, of the cities that had established
themselves on Facebook or Twitter, only 13 had more than
500 fans on Facebook, and only seven had more than 500
Twitter followers. Much more work needs to be done to
use these networks as tools of constituent feedback and
persuasion.
www.govloop.com

GovLoop is a social network with
over 25,000 members from federal,
state, and local governments.
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APPLICATIONS
Open data, open minds
Massive amounts of online data are being generated by
people as they update their profiles, purchase products
and services, and go about their daily lives. From crude
surveys to scientific polling, governing bodies have always
sought to know (and often to shape) the mindset and
behaviors of those they govern. New data processing tools
and algorithms are now allowing access to an ongoing,
continuously updated stream of live data that tells the story
of people’s values, habits, and desires. By “scraping” this
data for pertinent information, those in power can much
more easily and precisely learn the pulse of political psy-
chology—of citizen-defined interest, which was previously
only intuited by savvy politicians or interpreted by pollsters,
and was subject to misleading biases and agendas.
Data scraping can also be used by citizen groups to check
and monitor government and corporate actions. As the
goal of transparency becomes realized and more machine-
readable government and corporate data comes online,
data processing tools will pull insights and patterns out of
the flow. Watchdog groups can “follow the money” and
expose misuse and abuse of resources. Citizen journalists
can track data trails across nations, connecting dots that
would have remained obscure.
Signal: Promoting open access
In late 2009, the Government 2.0 Taskforce in Australia,
under its mission “to investigate how the Australian
Government can increase the openness of government and
encourage greater online engagement,” issued a call for
entries into a contest for developers, called Mashup
Australia, to demonstrate novel and useful applications
of government data and the benefits of open access to
government information. One of the grand-prize winners
among the 82 entries was a mashup that used crime
statistics and census data to paint a picture of different
neighborhoods through visualization of “economic, educa-
tion, safety, and socioeconomic indicators.” Compelling
data applications like these will make information acces-
sible and meaningful for large numbers of citizens.
Signal: Aggregating investigative journalism
Under risky and difficult conditions, investigative journalists
expose abuses and crimes committed by governments,
organizations, and individuals. In a globalized world, it is
often difficult to follow information across borders. The
Global Investigative Journalism Network is a clearinghouse
for information that can be scraped, processed, and
synthesized to look for significant connections among
disparate investigative leads. This information can be
used to pressure governments and organizations often
in locations far away from where a fact originated. What
is a trivial fact in one country might be the key piece of
information that exposes an illegal weapons sale or an
offshore child labor ring in another country.
www.mashupaustralia.org

Mashup Australia was a contest held
to demonstrate novel applications of
government data.
www.globalinvestigativejournalism.org

The Global Investigative Journalism Network is a
depository for information that can be searched to make
connections among disparate investigative leads.
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flickr.com/photos/donsoloflickr.com/24743856@N03(zuoyou)
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PRinciples
Principles
For persuasive organizations
The spectrum of forces, technologies, and applications presented in this report illustrate the rapid multiplication
of points of persuasion in our daily lives. As we move forward into the next decade, we find ourselves in a period
of uncertainty about our planet’s environmental and economic future. We will need to bring to bear all the tools of
persuasion that we can muster in order to create behavior change that matters.
In many cases, the emerging tools of persuasion identified
here will give us better understanding of and communica-
tion with people at an individual level. There is a strong
connection between amplified persuasion and simply com-
municating with more people on their terms and at their
convenience. More personalized is more persuasive. We
will see better messaging and media that is more relevant
and more useful for us, and we will be able to create it
as well.
As new technologies and media allow us to build informa-
tion into our environments, we are also witnessing the birth
of a new architecture of persuasion. While the impact is
often unintentional, the design of digital artifacts invites us
to interact with the world in certain ways. Even the most
basic sensors highlight some measurements over others,
and simply drawing attention is enough to impact behavior.
Based on the diversity of material presented in this report,
we have distilled a set of 15 key practices to help guide
organizations as they begin to explore the new aspects of
persuasion that will emerge over the coming decade:
1. Recognize human needs at the scale of
neurons and micro-actions
Whether at the scale of a genome, a neuroreceptor, a
personal social network, a facial expression, or a massively
multi-user digital system, we are gaining new understand-
ing of human behaviors with each passing day. New tools
are transforming how we see, explain, and ultimately
address human needs and actions.
Neural imaging and genetic sequencing are changing our
understanding of needs, causality, and motivation at the
level of neural activity and genetic code. While technology to
scan the brain in detail and understand the data enough to
act on it in any real, practical way is likely some years away,
scientists are already making progress in this direction by
combining biometric data from a variety of sources (respira-
tion, heart rate, motion, sweat) with in-depth interviews.
The spread of digital social tools ranging from text messag-
ing to online networking has created entirely new, large-
scale data sets made up of individual micro-actions that
are captured click by click, such as “Liking” a comment on
Facebook. The value of these data sets is just beginning to
be understood. Expect the next decade to be one of new,
unexpected insights into our similarities and differences,
data “scraped” from a view of human activity that we’ve
never had before.
Human resources, marketing, product development, and
strategy groups should start experimenting with new lenses
on their employees, consumers, and business partners.
What happens when you see your audience through a lens
of biodata or neuroresponse?
2. Explore new incentive systems that
optimize neural, cognitive, and social rewards
We are on the threshold of designing not slightly better,
but much better interactions. The growing focus on brains,
bodies, and clicks will allow us to create new programs
for optimizing our connections with places, content,
and people. We will tailor the amount of visual, verbal,
and other sensory stimuli for ourselves, and others, in
order to enhance participation, memory, analysis, and
positive emotions. This will transform learning, both in
the classroom and at work, allowing the most innovative
organizations to increase their people’s knowledge,
productivity, and happiness.
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INSTITUTE FOR THE FUTURE | The Future of Persuasion
New neural, cognitive, and social reward systems will also
mean adopting new forms of compensation and incentives.
Money, it is being understood, is only one form of rather
crude (but not weak) motivation for most human behaviors.
Game mechanics are now being used to activate dopamine
neurons in a whole set of new non-game contexts, while
alternate currencies or badges are conferring social vis-
ibility and status.
3. Experiment with new persuasive
technologies to remediate stressed-out
systems and populations
Global problems require novel approaches to persua-
sion. The aging of the human population, increasing social
inequalities, and the as-of-yet unknown impacts of climate
change on communities, will create the need for new kinds
of action at the individual, network, community, and na-
tional level. Your organization has to get engaged with us-
ing persuasive forces will be used to stimulate and support
higher levels of engagement over the next decade, chief
among them: new levels of self-control that will increase
personal productivity and personal health; new levels of
collective cohesion that will increase the power of distribut-
ed groups to attract and influence new members; and new
levels of top-down coordination that will shape the role of
institutions in a networked society.
4. Build new literacies for digitally-and
physically-aware environments
Sensor technologies will soon be ubiquitous. Cell phones,
operating systems, implantable chips, tablets, apps,
bio-state monitors, laptops and desktops, social network-
ing platforms, presence sensors in the floorboards of our
homes and alertness sensors in the dashboards of our
cars: the number and diversity of these potentially persua-
sive technologies in our lives are increasing with every year.
In the majority of cases, they are self-adopted and seen
as helpful or fun tools for their users. Getting sensors into
people’s lives—or getting access to the data created by
those sensors—will become a critical business and organi-
zational need in the next decade. Plan ahead by exploring
how your products or services are already interacting with
sensor data, or how you could embed your product and
services with new data-reporting mechanisms.
5. Tap the emotional profiles of workers, citizens, and
other groups to meet their needs
Connections are forming between emotional and digital
worlds. It will become more common, in the next decade,
to use technology to detect and express our own emotions
and those of our friends, co-workers, and larger networks.
Our cell phones and computing devices, equipped with
biosensors and semantic analytics, will know something of
our emotional state and adapt themselves accordingly. For
businesses and other organizations, we will see a growing
dilemma about how to use these new tools.
For instance, will employers want to analyze the emo-
tional expressions of their workers as a new form of pulse
survey? Will governments track the kinds of events and
media reports that create more positive emotional expres-
sion, and try to increase them? In the next decade, expect
more nuanced understandings of emotion to play a part in
reshaping products, businesses, services, and brands.
6. Move beyond advertising to community-based brands
Advertising is now beginning to move into all our digital
channels. As this happens, the best ads will be so relevant
to our contextual needs that the line between an ad and an
aid to a desired end will be blurred. Forward-looking com-
panies are already engaging in conversational marketing,
seeking out and supporting communities in which their lead
users are active, and underwriting consumer-led activities
and content that fits with their overall brand message.
7. Engage your networks in mutually rewarding
persuasive profiling
Digital profiles, or “digital mirrors”—the collection of online
attributes and actions that result from the digitization of
various parts of our lives—tell a story about our values,
habits, and desires. This story is becoming much more
than a passive reflection of our “real lives,” and is moving
toward anticipation, prediction, and prescription. Third par-
ties will be able to understand the triggers that shape our
behaviors at an individual level, and to create a “persuasive
profile” that could tailor the information we come across
based on what is most likely to compel us to action. Ideally,
third-party sites with access to this kind of sophisticated
analysis of individual-level persuadability would share it
with users so that they could use it for their own ends,
say, to lose weight. Organizations seeking to keep pace
with these developments will need to think through their
approach to the persuasive profiling of customers, employ-
ees, and shareholders.
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PRinciples
8. Harness the potency of avatar experiences
Research increasingly supports the profound finding that
the human brain does not fully distinguish between real
and virtual experiences. Despite the arguments against
the effects of video game violence, at least some of what
happens in computer-generated environments has as
much psychological impact on us as things that happen in
the real world. This means that there will be extraordinary
opportunity to develop more robust virtual interactions, and
that these will shape offline behavior as well.
Virtual interactions with digital versions of real-world prod-
ucts will be the next frontier for building brand affinity and
awareness, and for fostering distributed collaboration in the
workplace.
9. Use virtuality to craft “better than real” experiences
Increasingly, the virtual and the real will blend. Emerging
augmented reality technologies are giving us enormous
powers to create combinations of physical and virtual living
that will have more powerful impacts than “plain old real.”
We will see the emergence of new categories of emotional
experiences that can only be had through blended reality.
This new “world of pure imagination,” as a current AT&T
ad puts it, will create new opportunities for healing and
health, but may also open up new threats to psychological
stability.
Organizations that can overlay virtual effects onto real-
world experiences, whether at work, in the retail space, or
for entertainment, will have vastly more impact and reach
than those that cannot.
10. Use simplicity to increase persuasiveness in a
multi-channel environment
Even as we worry about our fragmented attention and loss
of ability to focus, the rise of multi-layered, multimedia
conversations and interactions with multiple screens over
the course of a day, means that we are opening ourselves
up to much more persuasive intervention than ever before.
To the TV and its 400+ channels and the PC at home and
work, we are adding the smart phone, e-reader, and tablet
with their hundreds of apps, and of course our social media
with its endless links, comments, and updates.
To take advantage of one of the multiple points of interven-
tion that we are creating in our everyday routines requires
crack execution of simplicity and the reduction of the bar-
riers between desire and action—in real time. As BJ Fogg
notes, “simplicity is a function of your scarcest resource in
the moment.”
A key aspect of persuasion in this noisy environment is
stripping away all data that the particular user considers
unnecessary, and showing only what needs to be known to
quickly act or adjust behavior. Simplicity sticks.
11. Craft strategic organizational social networks
Just as individuals will be increasingly influenced by their
online social configurations, so will organizations. Compa-
nies will need much greater understanding of their digital
context and how it influences them, their brand, and their
employees. They will want to “design” networks that re-
duce risk and vulnerability and increase benefits such
as positive emotions.
Figuring out what kinds of data are persuasive to differ-
ent communities of stakeholders will also be increasingly
important.
12. Anticipate debates about autonomous
persuasive technologies
Persuasion has always been a contentious issue, and
next-generation persuasion promises to bring us closer to
choices we have imagined but never before faced. We are
continuing our long human history of creating new tools to
do things for us. The next phase of technological develop-
ment will be tools that not only detect new sets of human
conditions but also then report those conditions and adapt
what they deliver to us, acting more autonomously to alter
our environment or behavior. The upswing in tools for
stimulating behavior change will add new fuel to the old
debate on what is gained and what is lost when we relin-
quish human capacity to machines. As our technologies
know more and more about us, and take action accord-
ingly, we will see new cultural splits in the population and
a small but powerful movement to refuse full engagement
with these tools.
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INSTITUTE FOR THE FUTURE | The Future of Persuasion
13. Engage the public in an active discourse on the
potential for new forms of subliminal persuasion
Subliminal advertising has been banned in many countries
for decades, but ambient design and digital audio-, video-,
and photo-morphing technologies will increasingly influ-
ence us without us being aware of what they are doing.
This could lead to powerful personal applications and the
capability to amplify will power, but will be very risky prac-
tice for commercial organizations and government bodies.
Organizations exploring these topics will be called upon to
demonstrate their integrity by using the promise of pre-
attentive persuasion only for the right reasons, and with
the buy-in of employees, stakeholders, or consumers.
14. Use emerging persuasive technologies to
build empathy
Games, augmented reality overlays, and increasingly
powerful virtual experiences will enable some users to gain
new empathy and perspective. Morally complex, emotion-
ally fraught, better-than-real experiences will broaden our
understanding of how the world works and how it feels, for
instance, to inhabit a different kind of body in a different
social context. This transition will invite users to build an
empathic understanding of situations in parallel to an intel-
lectual comprehension of them. In situations where these
empathic connections are developed, expect them to both
facilitate organizational communication and to bring out-
side perspectives into new contexts, including “persuading
the persuaders.” Organizations can change their relation-
ships to employees and consumers alike by adopting new
tools for empathy-building, allowing themselves to be
persuaded by the opinions of those who are far away from
decision-making centers.
15. Use the future as a tool of persuasion
Conceptualizations of the future are inherently tools of
persuasion. With the techniques and technologies detailed
here, we are able to more easily design visualizations of
multiple, possible futures as aids to decision-making and
behavior change. This increased engagement with possible
future outcomes increases our ability to adapt to change.
As always, better understanding of future consequences
is a key driver of behavior modifications in the present. At
an individual level, we will be able to think and to program
triggers to motivate our future selves.
It is possible to powerfully persuade simply by more
effectively “looking before we leap.”
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APPENDIX
In the course of our research, we were fortunate to speak with a wide range of experts. Their insights are
incorporated throughout the report, but we are happy to be able to provide additional excerpts, culled from the of
transcripts of our discussions with them.
INTERVIEW: LEE SHELDON Professor Lee Sheldon, Associate Professor, Department of Language, Litera-
ture, and Communication, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, used the mechanics and incentives of Massively
Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG) to invert the structure of his Multi-Player Game Design class.
In the following excerpt, Professor Sheldon outlines his rationale, and discusses some examples of how the
application of concepts such as “boss raids”—where gamers form partnerships to attack a large and powerful
enemy—provoked his students to learn in new, more collaborative, engaged, and adaptive ways. The following
are a few highlights from his conversation with IFTF:
Appendix
Hear more from the experts
What prompted you to experiment with bringing
MMORPG mechanics to your classroom?
I was sitting here preparing my syllabus, and I had taught
Game Design and Multiplayer Game Design once or twice
already, and I had a major problem. The students just sat
there. One fell asleep. The ones who were engaged were
engaged, what else can I do? Well, heck, I’m teaching
Multiplayer Game Design, why not do it as a multi-player
game. So, I divided up the classroom into zones, we created
guilds—the whole syllabus is all about translating regular
pedagogy into gamer terms. I had a chart. They could look
at the syllabus and say, “Oh I’m Level 4, I now have a B+,”
or whatever. I said at the beginning of the class when I went
in, “Okay, you all have Fs. However, through quests and kill-
ing mobs and boss raids, etc., etc., you can level up to the
point where you get an A.” and I knew I had them.
We’ve now conducted two classes like this. The first was
our beta test, and in the second one, I just leapt in with both
feet, and it’s been wonderful. They’re basically teaching the
class material to one another. Just a couple of examples—
they do guild quests, where an entire guild reads the text
that’s supposed to be taught. They divide up any way they
want, they can even just have one person do it or they can
all do it. Guilds are about six or seven students and some
of them get up there and drone on and on and read the
PowerPoint bullet point by bullet point. After that happened
a couple of times, I had a class lesson in how not to do
that, because nobody pays attention then. Even if they’re
your peers, you’re going to lose them, but one of them
did their presentation as So You Want to Be a Millionaire,
and every three or four slides, a slide would come up and
there would be music and trumpets and there would be a
multiple choice question and the guilds would all compete
to answer that question, and they gave them candy. And it
was wonderful. Everybody was involved. They were trash-
talking, they were yelling at each other, and they learned
that one better than I think any of the others.
The other example is this semester. I gave them a midterm prep
where they have to prepare for a boss raid because there’s
going to be a lot of variables. You don’t know exactly what is
going to happen, and I had 60 questions of which 40 were go-
ing to end up on the midterm. It was an open-book preparation
– we use two books in class … [and] one person in each guild
had one of those books, and then I would ask the question and
they would hurriedly look it up in the book, and then they would
shout out their zone name, that was their buzzer.
The first time, there was one guild that was doing pretty good
and the other guilds were getting annoyed. They said, “Okay,
there’s got to be a better way to do this.” The next thing they did
was to have one person look it up and they would tell enough
people in the guild, because there were sometimes as many as
eight different things they had to remember, and some of them
were failing to memorize them instantaneously, so six people
would then memorize one thing, and so they would shout that
out, and so that guild started to do well, and the other guilds
were sort of grumbling and grumbling. Then, they started writing
it down really fast, because you have to close the book before
you can hit the buzzer, so you can’t go back and check, so then
they were writing down the answers. And so that guild started
to win, and then, one of the guilds whipped out their cell phones
and one of them was taking photographs of the page where the
answer was and then reading it off the cell phone. And I said, this
is exactly how you prepare for a boss raid in a game. You learn
the strategy, you try, you wipe, you do it again, and so on. And
they did incredibly well on that exam.
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54.
INSTITUTE FOR THE FUTURE | The Future of Persuasion
The conversation ranged from Aristotle’s opinion polling in
ancient Greece, to the art of evoking the affective discon-
tent of young Europeans, to planning for mutations in your
messaging. Here are a few highlights.
What new media or technologies are most relevant
now and will be over the next decade for politics and
governance?
I think the future of persuasion is going to be around “data
scraping.” There are many applications that show which ar-
ticles are being forwarded or liked; we are seeing raw stats
on what people are finding attractive.
So, it’s interesting to look at what technologies like these are
offering in terms of persuasion, because part of persuasion
has always been to try and read what an audience wants.
This goes all the way back to Aristotle’s Rhetoric, a whole
two-thirds of which is dedicated to why the Athenian citizen
wants a harbor. This is completely irrelevant to today’s world,
except in what it says about persuasion. Aristotle is saying
you can’t just make a pitch to anybody unless you already
understand what they want, how they want it, and how they
want it connected to themselves. I like to look at Aristotle’s
Rhetoric as one of the first works of market research.
Before these new technologies for data scraping, we’ve had
to infer population desires by doing public opinion polls,
and polling is always going to be limited or biased by the
questions you ask, or by events of the day, and what is on
people’s mind at the time of the polling. Now we have the
means to figure out how people are thinking about things.
For example, let’s say you and I are interested in electric cars.
By trolling enough websites, discussion boards, forwarded
articles, and such, we can get an indication of what people
are interested in in terms of electric cars: what issues, what
models of car, what ways people like to think about and share
news about electric cars (whether statistical accounts or new
narratives). This will be very important in terms of persuasion.
We will get a better handle on how people actually understand
their world and what they actually value about their world.
You can’t just punch that information into an algorithm and out
comes something else. You are going to need people who can
read the scraped data and make meaningful narratives out of it.
There is a big place for “narrative constructors” (novelists, sto-
rytellers) who can take massive amounts of desire and fantasy
and write it into a narrative that actually resonates with people.
It seems as if we are bypassing the problems with
people self-reporting their thoughts and feelings, by
instead “getting inside the heads” of people.
Right, but we are not getting inside the heads of individuals. We
are getting aggregate data, and getting into the “mass head”—
of which there are lots of outliers, but the bell curves are huge.
Are there “old” media or technologies that we don’t
typically think about that are still relevant for the future
of persuasion?
Gatherings, physical gatherings. And I’m not thinking of the
protest models—the Tea Party march on Washington, or
any progressive protest march against X or whatever. I’m
talking about groups like Improv Everywhere and similar
spontaneous “flash mob” kinds of gatherings, or temporary
autonomous zones, “train parties,” and other things like
that. Of course, marketers are already understanding this
and are trying to exploit it as much as possible.
One thing that strikes me is the importance of “non-
instrumentality” in these gatherings to the action itself. We
learned this with Reclaim the Streets. We were having these
great parties, and a bunch of us started saying, “This is
great, but we’ve got to make this more political.” When we
started to make it more explicitly political, we started to lose
people. And that’s a problem for persuasion: how do you
persuade in such a way if you don’t retain that wonderment
that happens in non-instrumental physical gatherings?
So you’re saying there is a need to make things com-
pelling in and of themselves (that’s the “art”), with the
sponsorship or agenda smuggled in, and only visible
to those who seek it out—you can’t hit people over the
head with it?
Good work in this area opens up spaces that people have
to fill in. The problem with things like the Mountain Dew
“DEWmocracy” campaign was that there was no space in
there. Or the problem with the Chevy Tahoe campaign is that
they opened up space but they didn’t really want people to
occupy it. If you “build in” space, and build ideas for space
into your messaging, it means being open to the answers
that people give you. This is where it works well for us in the
democracy business, as opposed to the selling business,
because we can create spaces for people to imagine in.
So, if we shift persuasion from persuading people to think
X to instead simply persuading people to think, then it’s a
whole different ballgame.
INTERVIEW: STEPHEN DUNCOMBE
Dr. Stephen Duncombe is a media, culture, and politics scholar and activist who has spent years studying and
participating in the highs and lows of political behavior. His book Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an
Age of Fantasy explores the political truths and persuasive powers that are hidden in games and popular media,
and how people can use those truths and powers for ethical politics. Dr. Duncombe is an Associaate Professor at
New York University.
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55.
APPENDIX
As the real and the virtual blend, we are seeing “online”
advertising move into the physical world through the
first augmented reality apps that deliver information in
context. Do you think the future of marketing is highly
targeted context-aware advertising? Will my phone
ring when I saunter past a café to “remind” me that my
favorite latte might be the perfect pick-me-up?
There are certain kinds of impulses that can be stimulated
in that way and certain kinds of products suited for
advertising that pull triggers like this in the short term, like
a jolt of caffeine. So yes, once you understand the self-
reinforcing, anxiety-causing triggers in people, you can
certainly induce compulsive buying behavior. “I notice
you’re trying to lose weight. Buy this diet food! Join
this gym!” Once the machine finds the loop that it can
stimulate, it’s going to push that button as often
as possible.
There are some impulsive, short-term, spontaneous hot-
button responses that marketers could exploit for a good
long time. To those marketers, we will become as passive
as iron filings moving between magnets as we go through
our day making little choices. But that approach doesn’t
work very well for considered decisions like, say, buying a
car or a house.
Also, we don’t actually have enough money to constantly
answer the pings to purchase. If the external pings we
receive for financial attention keep increasing while our
capacity to respond financially to those pings reduces, the
only result can be anxiety or eventual desensitization to
those advertising pings.
As neuroscientists learn more about what lights up our
brain, I’d imagine that those advertising pings will be-
come more precise and less obvious to our conscious
minds.
As advertisers’ manipulation of our minds through color,
sound, and even direct neural stimulation gets more and
more honed, I think it will lead to the same kind of fatigue
that mall and casino designers discovered by the late
1980s. They thought their tight control over the environ-
ment—no clocks, no windows—would disorient people
and cause them to spend more money, but it actually made
shoppers feel anxious after a time. Now those coercive
malls that were built in the 1970s are either gone or have
had skylights installed.
In neuromarketing, though, it’s not one marketer coming at
us at a time from some central control. They are each doing
it individually—competing for our attention. And it’s not like
they’ll stop to give the consumer some breathing room. If
they all work at the same time to constantly stimulate us,
they’ll fry us. Perhaps all the advertisers will get together
and develop a currency so they don’t overload the con-
sumer market. But I have a feeling their short-term goals
are such that they can’t put down the gun unless everyone
else does.
If you think these new technologies will be effective
only in small niches or until cognitive overload melts
our minds, what is the future of advertising?
First, we will have an explosion in all these new kinds of
advertising technologies. But then I think advertising and
branding as we think of it today will probably fade away
completely. People will no longer buy cookies because they
saw on TV that they are made by elves in a hollow tree. We
are in an era of media transparency. People want to know,
“Are these cookies good? What are the ingredients? What
are the conditions like where they were manufactured?”
Advertising is being replaced by public relations, and the
facts are what will help companies promote their goods. It’s
about making a real case for why your product is superior,
and expressing how far back and forward those positive
attributes go. The brand story is replaced by the story of
the product.
INTERVIEW: DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF
For two decades, media theorist Douglas Rushkoff has studied how digital technology can be a tool of em-
powerment and also control. Rushkoff, a co-founder of the Institute for Applied Memetics, is the author of ten
books on media and popular culture, including Media Virus!, Coercion: Why We Listen to What “They” Say,
and Life Inc: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back. He has also written and hosted
several FRONTLINE documentaries, including “The Merchants of Cool,” which looks at the influence of cor-
porations on youth culture, and “The Persuaders,” about the darker side of marketing and new techniques to
overcome consumer resistance.
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